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The American Prospect - articles by authorenSteve Bannon and Katie Roiphe Are Very Worried. So Is Donald Trumphttp://prospect.org/article/steve-bannon-and-katie-roiphe-are-very-worried-so-donald-trump
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<p>Steve Bannon on January 16, 2018, on Capitol Hill</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">E</span>verybody’s worried about the men. Steve Bannon. Katie Roiphe. Donald J. Trump. Whether in response to the generalized fury of the #MeToo movement, or allegations of intimate-partner violence against a key White House official, the presumed vulnerability of men to charges of sexual harassment or outright violence has drawn the sympathies of a self-described <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html">pussy-grabber</a>, an <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/stephen-bannon-donald-trump-alt-right-breitbart-news/">enabler of the racist alt-right</a>, and the feminist movement’s foremost <a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=concern%20troll">concern troll</a>.</p>
<p>While the White House is having <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/13/politics/rob-porter-john-kelly-timeline-white-house/index.html">trouble getting its story straight</a> about just when it learned that former staff secretary Rob Porter had been subject to a restraining order requested by one of his two ex-wives, or the claim of the other that he punched her in the face (including <a href="https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/961130828804902913">photographic evidence</a> of a black eye), one thing is certain: The president’s sympathies lie with Porter, and perhaps all men accused of misdeeds done against women.</p>
<p>On February 10, three days after <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/07/white-house-aide-rob-porter-resigns-after-allegations-from-ex-wives-397407">Porter resigned</a> from the White House once the allegations became public, Trump tweeted that “Peoples [sic] lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. … There is no recovery for someone falsely accused. … Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?”</p>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused - life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?</p>
<p>— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/962348831789797381?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 10, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p> </p>
<p>It took another four days for the president to make clear that he “opposes” domestic violence. But he’s yet to express sympathy for a female survivor of such.</p>
<p>In an <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2018/03/the-other-whisper-network-2/">essay in <em>Harper’s</em></a>, Roiphe quotes an unnamed critic of the #MeToo movement who, she says, won’t go on the record with her critique because of how mean feminists would be to her should she dare to voice her trepidation. “What seems truly dangerous to me is the complete disregard the movement shows for a sacred principle of the American criminal justice system: the presumption of innocence,” the critic reportedly told Roiphe.</p>
<p>Elsewhere, while watching the Golden Globe Awards—at which Oprah Winfrey gave a spirited speech about women rising up against sexual violence—Steve Bannon fretted about the fate of Western civilization in general, and Donald J. Trump in particular, <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-13/in-exile-bannon-sounds-the-metoo-alarm">according to Joshua Green</a> of <em>Bloomberg Businessweek</em>.</p>
<p>“The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo 10,000 years of recorded history,” Bannon <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-13/in-exile-bannon-sounds-the-metoo-alarm">told Green</a>. “You watch. The time has come. Women are gonna take charge of society. And they couldn’t juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch. This [the Golden Globe Awards] is a definitional moment in the culture. It’ll never be the same going forward.”</p>
<p>At the Globes, you’ll recall, many of the women in attendance wore black in solidarity with women who are telling stories of having been sexually harassed or assaulted at work. At Trump’s first State of the Union address, Democratic women did the same.</p>
<p>Though he might have overstated, Bannon is on to something. That Rob Porter’s ex-wives, Colbie Holderness and Jennifer Willoughby, even dared to report the abuse to the FBI speaks to the empowerment women are feeling through the force of collective outrage at the election of a president who, himself, was once <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/opinion/rob-porter-trump-administration-abuse.html">accused of sexual violence</a> by his ex-wife, Ivana. (She later recanted.)</p>
<p>And still, <span class="pullquote-right">Katie Roiphe, who says she is a feminist “exhilarated” by this moment in which women are speaking of their experience of sexual harassment and assault, is worried that the #MeToo movement has gone too far, presumably because people were mean to her on Twitter.</span> (Welcome to Twitter, Katie Roiphe.)</p>
<p>What each of these people have is an investment in patriarchy: Trump and Bannon because of their commitment to white, male power; Roiphe because, in a patriarchal world, there’s always a payoff for a self-described feminist who targets other feminists for the sake of the men.</p>
<p>Particularly telling is Roiphe’s attack on Rebecca Traister of <em>New York</em> magazine, whose thoughtful writing about the importance of the #MeToo movement really gets under Roiphe’s skin. In her <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2017/11/rebecca-traister-on-the-post-weinstein-reckoning.html">November 12 <em>New York</em> piece</a>, Traister examines the nature of the rage propelling #MeToo, noting that now unleashed, it’s not always easy to differentiate degrees of offense once one’s repressed anger is granted expression. Implicit in Traister’s admission is the need to do so—to make those distinctions. But you wouldn’t know that from reading Roiphe.</p>
<p>“When Trump supporters let their anger run terrifyingly out of control, we are alarmed, and rightly so,” she writes. “Perhaps Traister should consider that ‘I am so angry I am not thinking straight’ is not the best mood in which to radically envision and engineer a new society.”</p>
<p>And with that, Katie Roiphe equates Traister and those in the #MeToo movement (of which I count myself) with the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/trump-defends-white-nationalist-protesters-some-very-fine-people-on-both-sides/537012/">very fine people</a> who descended on Charlottesville in August, some bearing Nazi flags and insignia. Steve Bannon’s people. Donald Trump’s people. See how that works?</p>
<p>Patriarchy is powerful, but wary of its weaknesses in the face of female fury. If the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States was the ultimate expression of backlash against a reordering of society long and slowly underway, it was also a galvanizing moment for women who are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Everybody’s a little uneasy, even those who are mad as hell. We know not everybody will exercise their newfound voices responsibly—because that’s human nature.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">But where is the chorus demanding “due process” for all of the women pushed out of workplaces in highly gendered ways?</span> Most workplaces allow dismissals at the will of the employer, for any reason—whether it be taking off a few days until your black eye heals, or reporting the boss for discrimination. #MeToo is as close as many of us will ever get to “due process,” so we’ll take it, thank you very much.</p>
<p>Fear of female power is the thing that prompted the creation of the patriarchy in the first place. As the historian Nancy Hatch Dupree explained to me during a discussion of the Taliban’s oppression of women, the need to control women stems from the fact that women are the transmitters of culture. Which means they can change society at a cultural level, if only they can manage to marshal collective power—no small task in a world run by men.</p>
<p>Should the patriarchy come to an end, Bannon and Trump will be toast, of course. And Katie Roiphe will be out of a gig, with no one left to serve.</p>
<p>Alas, we have a way to go before that happens.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 15 Feb 2018 15:06:34 +0000229559 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanThe State of the Union Is Unknownhttp://prospect.org/article/state-union-unknown
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<p>Trump shakes hands with Vice Presidenet Pence and Speaker of the House Ryan as he arrives to deliver the State of the Union address on January 30, 2018.</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>f you watched Tuesday’s State of the Union address on cable television, you were likely treated afterward to the results of <a href="http://www.localnews8.com/news/politics/cnn-instant-poll-trump-gets-least-positive-reaction-in-at-least-20-years/694162056">instant polls</a> measuring how well the speech was received. Pundits parsed the rhetoric and what it portended. Others evaluated the quality of the speechwriting, or how strongly the special guests highlighted in the president’s remarks plucked at viewers’ heartstrings.</p>
<p>This is how State of the Union addresses are routinely treated, which is why we should not entertain such treatment. We are in a new time, a time in which the president of the United States defies the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants-from-shithole-countries-in-oval-office-meeting/2018/01/11/bfc0725c-f711-11e7-91af-31ac729add94_story.html">norms of civilized society</a>, not to mention democracy. To use the normal instruments of evaluation to assess an event presided over by the face of the right wing’s Plunder Project™ is to take part in the normalization of a president, administration, and congressional majority who are dismantling the institutions of the republic, whether to shield the president from reaping the consequences of his alleged misdeeds, or to enable the looting of the commons.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">It is not enough to note all the coded racism and nativism in the address, dubbing it “red meat for the base.”</span></p>
<p>It is not enough to remark in passing that the president mentioned neither the #MeToo movement nor the Russia investigation. Of course he didn’t. <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ultraviolet-trump-state-of-the-union_us_5a70ce2ae4b0be822ba11768">Duh</a>.</p>
<p>If there’s anything worth noting in Trump’s endless valedictory, it’s his promise to make it easier for government managers to <a href="http://prospect.org/article/spoiling-spoils">fire members of the civil service</a>, for breaking government serves his greater goals.</p>
<p>Here’s what we witnessed in the last 24 hours. A man who assumed the White House through a <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-elections/donald-trump-lost-popular-vote-hillary-clinton-us-election-president-history-a7470116.html">quirk of the U.S. electoral</a> system and with the <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/30/russia-2018-election-meddling-376826">aid of a hostile foreign power</a> gave a speech to both houses of Congress on the same day that the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation resigned under pressure, just two months before his expected retirement date. The pressure was exerted, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/us/politics/andrew-mccabe-fbi.html">at the very least</a>, by the <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/944666448185692166?lang=en">tiny tweeting fingers</a> of the man who assumed the podium on Tuesday night. </p>
<p>FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe had led, under former Director James Comey, the investigations of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Republican candidate Donald J. Trump, and of the use of a private email server for government work by Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state. Having contempt for the outcome of the latter probe, and fear for the potential of the former, Trump <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-asked-the-acting-fbi-director-whom-he-voted-for-during-oval-office-meeting/2018/01/23/2cb50818-0073-11e8-8acf-ad2991367d9d_story.html?utm_term=.3af586ea0fc2">had it in for McCabe</a> from the get-go.</p>
<p>A day before Trump strode the halls of the Capitol building and up the center aisle of the House chamber, Andrew McCabe left the FBI building for the last time.</p>
<p>Just a week ago, we learned that Trump had given an order in June to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/us/politics/trump-mueller-special-counsel-russia.html">fire Robert Mueller</a>, the special counsel appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to oversee the Russia-election-meddling investigation, after Attorney General Jeff Sessions was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/top-gop-lawmaker-calls-on-sessions-to-recuse-himself-from-russia-investigation/2017/03/02/148c07ac-ff46-11e6-8ebe-6e0dbe4f2bca_story.html">shown to have lied</a> during his confirmation hearing about having met with agents of the Russian Federation (or maybe he just forgot). White House Counsel Don McGahn reportedly threatened to resign rather than execute the order, which Trump issued just weeks after having fired FBI Director James Comey of whom, Comey says, Trump demanded a loyalty pledge that Comey refused to give.</p>
<p>And for the last several days, your nation’s capital is abuzz with speculation that Trump <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/report-trump-vents-about-wanting-to-fire-muellers-boss-rod-rosenstein">may fire Rosenstein</a> in order to bring someone into his spot in the Justice Department more willing to fire Mueller. (Trump can’t directly fire Mueller; the order has to come from the leadership of the DoJ.)</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">In other words, the elements of a constitutional crisis are in play, and we’re talking about how a speech given by a charlatan, delivered to his lofty post with the aid of the kleptocratic authoritarian leader of a hostile foreign power, <a href="http://video.foxnews.com/v/5723149077001/">dial-tested</a> among a group of voters somewhere in the heartland. </span></p>
<p>So while it matters that the president is a racist who incites the racism of his base, it’s important to remember the purpose to which he’s put his racism: theft of the nation’s resources from all but his cronies. Scapegoated people have died at the hands of mobs to feed greed such as this. Trump’s own mob will suffer death and degradation with the satisfaction of having maimed a health-care program that bore the colloquial name of the nation’s only black president. And the billionaires will have their tax cut. They’ll have the deregulation that threatens the health of everyone’s children but their own. And the president will have his hotel, housed in a building <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-emoluments-suit-against-trump-20180125-story.html">owned by the American people</a>, where <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/2016/11/18/9da9c572-ad18-11e6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html">foreign dignitaries</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pro-trump-group-paid-tens-of-thousands-to-trumps-dc-hotel-and-former-campaign-aides/2018/01/25/63f82d20-01d9-11e8-bb03-722769454f82_story.html?utm_term=.bc3965436682">other favor-seekers</a> plunk down their thousands, which go straight to the president’s company.</p>
<p>Spare me your approval ratings and smarty-pants analysis of whether the speech hit the mark, or parsing the message it sent. Those are measurements reserved for the political activity in a functioning democracy, not a fledging authoritarian kleptocracy. The only question worth pondering is, how do we stop this?</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 31 Jan 2018 19:56:04 +0000229448 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanHow Freaked Out Are Republicans About Mueller? Ask the Russian Bots.http://prospect.org/article/how-freaked-out-are-republicans-about-mueller-ask-russian-bots
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<p>House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes enters the committee area on January 16, 2018, where Steve Bannon was being interviewed.</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he Russians are back, big time. The Russian bots, that is. And that means something big is happening in the investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into the Russian government’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. We all know who reaped the rewards of that intrusion.</p>
<p>Over the course of the last 48 hours, bots linked to the Russian Federation have <a href="https://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/">gone viral</a> on a Twitter hashtag created by Republican lawmakers who claim the Obama administration illegally spied on Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign during FBI surveillance of Russian diplomats and figures linked to the Kremlin. Never mind the problematic fact that Kremlin-linked figures under surveillance were chit-chatting with a presidential campaign that stood to gain from a Russian influence operation. In Age of Trump, such facts are easily overlooked, especially where the nation’s first black president is concerned.</p>
<p>The hashtag <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/24/16919910/releasethememo-explained-trump-russia">#ReleaseTheMemo</a> refers to a memorandum kept secret by House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes, which is alleged to contain classified information proving that Obama used the intelligence services and a secret warrant to keep tabs on the Trump operation. But Nunes refuses to release the memo, which Democrats have described as “<a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/01/24/580068641/the-memo-the-bureau-and-the-missing-texts-get-caught-up-on-the-war-over-the-fbi">a hit job</a>” on the FBI, according to NPR’s Ryan Lucas.</p>
<p>Nunes, you’ll recall, recused himself for a time from Intelligence Committee activities involving the matter of Russia’s election meddling after it was revealed that he made a secret trip to a White House office, where Trump administration officials showed him classified information about the secret warrant granted to the Obama Justice Department under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But he’s all unrecused now, and making hay of a memo he says proves his case, which he will show to no one, not even officials in the U.S. Department of Justice.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Members of the right-wing congressional Freedom Caucus <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/conservative-gop-caucus-talked-to-trump-about-releasing-surveillance-memo-before-launching-campaign/2018/01/23/7ff2a198-0037-11e8-bb03-722769454f82_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trumpmemo-640pm%3Ahom">got the ball rolling</a> on the hashtag, and the bots latched on.</span> Some 400 of those Twitter bot accounts were created just this month, according to Jonathon Morgan of the nonprofit Data for Democracy, as reported by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/conservative-gop-caucus-talked-to-trump-about-releasing-surveillance-memo-before-launching-campaign/2018/01/23/7ff2a198-0037-11e8-bb03-722769454f82_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trumpmemo-640pm%3Ahom"><em>The Washington Post</em></a>.</p>
<p>Representative Adam Schiff and Senator Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrats on the House Intelligence and Senate Judiciary Committees, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/conservative-gop-caucus-talked-to-trump-about-releasing-surveillance-memo-before-launching-campaign/2018/01/23/7ff2a198-0037-11e8-bb03-722769454f82_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trumpmemo-640pm%3Ahom">sent a letter</a> to Twitter and Facebook expressing concern and demanding answers.</p>
<p>White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders joined the chorus of parroting nesting dolls on Tuesday, recommending “transparency” on the Nunes memo.</p>
<p>It’s all an attempt, of course, to discredit Mueller and the FBI, while creating a giant, <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/956012274942128128">howling distraction</a>.</p>
<p>Because if you look at what happened over the last 48 hours in the Mueller investigation, there’s plenty for Trump and his toadies to be freaked out about.</p>
<p>Start with the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/us/politics/jeff-sessions-special-counsel-russia.html?action=click&amp;contentCollection=Opinion&amp;module=Trending&amp;version=Full&amp;region=Marginalia&amp;pgtype=article">Mueller team’s interview</a> on Tuesday of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who met several times during the campaign with Sergey Kislyak, then Russia’s ambassador to the United States, and conveniently forgot to tell Congress about it during his confirmation process. Sessions, who served as a campaign surrogate for Trump and served on the president’s transition team, is the first cabinet member to submit to Mueller’s grilling, and he may well not be the last.</p>
<p>Move on to the news broken by <em>The Washington Post</em> that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-asked-the-acting-fbi-director-whom-he-voted-for-during-oval-office-meeting/2018/01/23/2cb50818-0073-11e8-8acf-ad2991367d9d_story.html?utm_term=.f29879417a7a">Trump asked Andrew McCabe</a>, the number-two guy at the FBI, whom McCabe had voted for. McCabe, whose wife ran for office in Virginia as a Democrat (and lost), has been in Trump’s sights since that time he fired former FBI Director James Comey, and Sessions has been pressuring FBI Director Christopher Wray to fire McCabe.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Oh, and speaking of Comey, we also learned in the last day that he was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/us/politics/jeff-sessions-special-counsel-russia.html?action=click&amp;contentCollection=Opinion&amp;module=Trending&amp;version=Full&amp;region=Marginalia&amp;pgtype=article">interviewed last year</a> by the Mueller team.</span></p>
<p>And that’s just in the last two days. Over the course of the last two weeks, Mueller <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/us/politics/steve-bannon-mueller-russia-subpoena.html">issued a grand jury subpoena</a> for Stephen K. Bannon, the former chief White House strategist who also ran the Trump campaign in its final stretch and served on the transition team. In the book <em>Fire and Fury</em>, Bannon famously told author Michael Wolff that a meeting led by Donald Trump Jr. between campaign officials and a Kremlin-linked lawyer was “treasonous”—a claim that got him pushed from his latest job as chief of the right-wing agitprop shop known as Breitbart News.</p>
<p>Perhaps most telling about the state of affairs vis-à-vis the Trump crowd and the Mueller investigation was Bannon’s performance last week in a closed-door hearing of the House Intelligence Committee on the Russia matter. There, the characteristically chatty and bombastic former aide faced a rapt audience and fell mute.</p>
<p>While not exactly citing executive privilege, Bannon, reportedly at the behest of White House lawyers, declined to answer questions about anything that took place during his tenure on the transition team or in the West Wing, prompting the committee to <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/16/steve-bannon-congress-testimony-subpoena-341492">issue a subpoena</a> of its own—which apparently yielded nothing.</p>
<p>Word is that Mueller intends to interview Trump, and it could happen soon. What’s that din, you ask? Why it’s the bots and the bootlickers, all in a dither, seeing their dreams of plunder rent asunder.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 24 Jan 2018 17:45:36 +0000229394 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanAmerica in the Age of Shitholinesshttp://prospect.org/article/america-age-shitholiness
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<p>Hundreds demonstrate against racism in Times Square on Martin Luther King Day in New York on January 15, 2018.</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">O</span>n my way out the door on January 11, I caught a glimpse of CNN on the TV, noting the news of the day: The text banner at the bottom of the screen said the president of the United States had called Haiti, El Salvador, and the nations of Africa “shithole countries.” I rolled my eyes and went on my way. Always knew the dude was racist; who didn’t? It took hours before I realized that I had never seen an expletive spelled out in full on a television news <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chyron">chyron</a>. Because, really, we’ve been in the Age of Shitholiness for a while now. Like since January 20, 2017.</p>
<p>The following morning brought the out-of-body experience of hearing the word uttered by the very precise Korva Coleman of NPR. It was a quote from the president, after all, as reported by senators who had attended the meeting at which he uttered it. But it was also a cultural turning point, a moment at which the mainstream media determined that the old norms of propriety could no longer apply in a world led by a huckster who routinely breaks them. I mean, after “grab ’em by the pussy,” what’s a little “shithole”?</p>
<p>At a moment when the world seems on the verge of blowing up, and in a wealthy nation poised to deport 800,000 of its people and rob <a href="https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/annual-chip-enrollment/?currentTimeframe=0&amp;sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D">nine million children</a> of their health care, this may seem a small thing. But it is not.</p>
<p>Cultural norms give shape and a certain order to society. When norms are smashed, it takes a minute for new ones to emerge and solidify. The period in between that of the smashing and the New Time tends to be one of chaos and uncertainty, lending an advantage to those whose aim is to grab power, money and resources.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">“Shithole” may be just a word, but rarely, if ever, has a single expletive signaled a historic shift like this one has.</span> It’s not simply about the kind of language deemed permissible in the public sphere. (I’m hardly a prude on such things, New Jersey being the land of my birth.) And its evidence of the president’s racism, however shocking in form, was yet another exhibit to add to the pile, along with “very fine people.” But the appearance of “shithole” in headlines and on TV screens devoted to coverage of the leader of the world’s most powerful nation reminds us that we’re in a place we’ve never before been, at the mark on the historical timeline that our progeny may teach as the beginning of the end of the republic. Because it’s not just the words that have changed.</p>
<p>It’s not normal for the manager of a presidential campaign to meet with an agent of a foreign government on the promise of an oppo dump on the opposing candidate, as Paul Manafort did in June 2016. It’s not normal for the president to demand a <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/366116-fbi-deputy-confirmed-to-congress-that-comey-told-him-about-trump">promise of loyalty</a> from the head of a law enforcement agency, as Donald J. Trump reportedly did of then-FBI Director James Comey, before firing him. It’s not normal for the chair of the House Intelligence Committee to collaborate with the White House on an investigation of the activities of the president and his aides as regards that foreign power, as Representative <a href="https://www.wired.com/2017/04/devin-nunes-white-house-trump-surveillance/">Devin Nunes did</a> in March.</p>
<p>It’s not normal to come before a congressional committee and <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/16/steve-bannon-congress-testimony-subpoena-341492">refuse to testify</a>, at the behest of White House lawyers—even though you no longer work for the White House—of your experience as a White House aide and transition-team leader, as Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and campaign CEO, did on Tuesday.</p>
<p>Nor is it normal for U.S. senators to come forward days after a meeting at which the president reportedly uttered a controversial statement, one that his office initially failed to deny he made, to say, wow, we didn’t hear that, even though the <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-twitter-shithole-countries_us_5a5d13bce4b04f3c55a526e4">people who did</a> were their fellow senators. This is what <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/14/us/politics/david-perdue-trump-shithole.html">Tom Cotton and David Perdue did</a>.</p>
<p>Now, because the president does not like the fact that his actual words were reported to the nation by a Democratic senator, the government may go unfunded. <span class="pullquote-right">Call it the #ShitholeShutdown.</span></p>
<p>Of course, it’s also not normal to incite nuclear war via a tweeted dick-wagging contest. (See how I did that? Writing “dick” in <em>The American Prospect</em>, just like it were normal?)</p>
<p>Then there’s the un-normality of the president using a building owned by the American people to house his own business, the Trump International Hotel, one grown highly profitable because of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/2016/11/18/9da9c572-ad18-11e6-977a-1030f822fc35_story.html">favor-seeking its existence fosters</a>. This is graft, a transgression usually reserved to politicians of lesser office.</p>
<p>And it’s not normal for the president to routinely and relentlessly attack the press as peddling falsehoods. This is what dictators do.</p>
<p>This is hardly a comprehensive list, but you get the idea.</p>
<p>In deciding not to euphemize the president’s “shithole” reference, the mainstream media did the nation a favor. This is your president, America. Is this the change you want to be in the world? Because things have indeed changed.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 17 Jan 2018 15:44:34 +0000229334 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanBannon’s Breitbart Exit Changes Nothinghttp://prospect.org/article/bannons-breitbart-exit-changes-nothing
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<p><span class="dropcap">Y</span>ou’d hardly be human if you didn’t feel a twinge of glee at the fall of Steve Bannon. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, you might say. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/us/politics/steve-bannon-breitbart-trump.html">Bannon’s resignation</a> from Breitbart News might even restore your faith in the resilience of democracy—but it shouldn’t.</p>
<p>However delicious the ignominious fate of the man who painted himself as Svengali to the dummy in the Oval, Bannon’s fast descent from savior to pariah illustrates structural rot in the machinery of the republic, wrought by a Supreme Court whose majority <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/citizens-united-v-federal-election-commission/">acts in the favor</a> of aspiring oligarchs. Sure, Bannon set his fate in motion through his own hubris. But ultimately his crash stemmed from the whims of a single donor family, as did his rise.</p>
<p>Without Rebekah Mercer, daughter of hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, Bannon would never have secured his top spot on the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump. Without Mercer, Bannon might never have been granted his role as the guiding force of Breitbart News, which, as <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/stephen-bannon-donald-trump-alt-right-breitbart-news/">he boasted</a> to journalist Sarah Posner, he refashioned as “the platform for the alt-right.”</p>
<p>Were it not for Cambridge Analytica, the data firm founded by Robert Mercer, Trump, the hate-spewing, alt-right-feeding candidate, quite probably would never have been elected. The Mercers, in addition to infusing Breitbart with $10 million and installing Bannon as its leader, placed the bombastic propagandist on the data firm’s board.</p>
<p>The Mercers also bankrolled the making of the book <em>Clinton Cash</em> by Peter Schweizer, riddled with inaccuracies and conspiracy-theorizing, that was produced by Bannon’s nonprofit Government Accountability Institute. As strategized by Bannon, the book’s core claims of corruption against Hillary Clinton were picked up and publicized by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html"><em>The New York Time</em></a><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html"><em>s</em></a> and <a href="https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/04/new-york-times-washington-post-fox-news-strike-deals-for-anti-clinton-research-205791"><em>The Washington Post</em></a>, setting in motion a narrative of dishonesty against the Democratic presidential nominee that she would find hard to shake.</p>
<p>In short, the Mercers bankrolled the racism and misogyny that brought Trump to power, and encouraged its spread. In the aftermath of the murderous mayhem of a white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/us/politics/steve-bannon-fired-trump-departure.html">Bannon’s botched response</a> led the Mercers to help <a href="http://libn.com/2017/08/18/bannon-mercer-reportedly-eye-tv-launch/">accelerate his exit</a> from the White House—already on his way out for his <a href="http://prospect.org/article/steve-bannon-unrepentant">interview with <em>The American Prospect</em> co-editor Robert Kuttner</a>—with the lure of backing Bannon’s dream of being the kingmaker who would, once and for all, vanquish the “establishment” of the Republican Party.</p>
<p>Even before Bannon’s embrace-the-racism-and-misogyny strategy blew up in his face with his backing of Roy Moore in the GOP primary for Alabama’s U.S. Senate seat, the Mercers showed signs of backing away; in November, Daddy Mercer sold his shares in Breitbart to his daughters and <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/robert-mercer-breitbart-milo_us_59fb2f10e4b0b0c7fa388aa2">disavowed</a> the antics of the hate-mongering Bannon protégé Milo Yiannopoulos. However much they may enjoy the racism and the misogyny, the Mercers’ main aim is to win. The tipping point came when the publication of excerpts from <em>Fire and Fury</em>, the new book by Michael Wolff, revealed Bannon’s low opinions of the president and his family. In the book, Bannon is quoted calling Donald Trump Jr. treasonous, Ivanka Trump “dumb as a brick,” and the president himself in potential <a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/01/04/worst-thing-steve-bannon-said-about-trump-money-laundering/">money-laundering trouble</a>.</p>
<p>It took only a <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-spoke-to-rebekah-mercer-on-the-phone-then-she-knifed-steve-bannon">phone call from the president</a> to convince Rebekah Mercer to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/us/politics/bannon-mercer-trump.html">announce</a> that her family would no longer back Bannon’s enterprises, <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-spoke-to-rebekah-mercer-on-the-phone-then-she-knifed-steve-bannon">according to</a> <em>The Daily Beast</em>’s Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng.</p>
<p>Oligarchy sides with power, and the guy in the nation’s top job has oodles more power than the guy who got him there.</p>
<p>Bannon may be gone, for the time being, from the national stage and electoral politics. But the Mercers, you can bet, aren’t going anywhere. They’ll continue to back candidates who either want to burn it all down and prove their power against the Koch brothers, their rivals in the game of right-wing, political moneyball.</p>
<p>This is how oligarchy works. This is America.</p>
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<p>Steve Bannon arrives at a party at the home of Robert Mercer on December 3, 2016, in Head of the Harbor, New York.</p>
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</div></div></div>Wed, 10 Jan 2018 15:09:16 +0000229291 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanA Hostile Foreign Power and the End of the Republichttp://prospect.org/article/hostile-foreign-power-and-end-republic
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<p>Donald Trump and Melania Trump arrive for a New Year's Eve party at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on December 31, 2017.</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">W</span>hen the history of America’s final days as a republic is written, it may be fairly said that a hostile foreign power helped elect an authoritarian president with no agenda other than plunder, that the majority of America’s white people took the plunderer’s racist, misogynist bait—and that the Congress of the United States helped him loot the public commons and cover up his likely crimes.</p>
<p>And that’s just the CliffsNotes version.</p>
<p>As the president sets about destroying the nation’s public institutions, Congress is <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/20/house-republicans-quietly-investigate-doj-fbi-310121">launching investigations</a> of the president’s investigators: the FBI, career Justice Department employees, and the special counsel appointed to investigate the president’s ties to Russian government agents during the 2016 presidential election. The Republican Congress, it seems, would rather investigate the president’s electoral opponent, who is not in power, and not wrecking such institutions as the <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/366150-wave-of-officials-leaving-epa-under-trump-report">Environmental Protection Agency</a>, or the <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/31/how-the-trump-administration-broke-the-state-department/">Departments of State</a> or <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/interior-official-zinke-montana-resort_us_5a2aae73e4b073789f693195">Interior</a>. She is not the one slipping loopholes into a tax law that <a href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes/welcome/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2017/12/18/president-trump-could-save-11-million-a-year-from-new-tax-bill/&amp;refURL=https://www.google.com/&amp;referrer=https://www.google.com/">ultimately benefit the president</a> and his family—and the president’s donors. She is not the one taking <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/948359545767841792?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.com%2Fentry%2Fdonald-trump-twitter-dishonest-media-awards_us_5a4c3249e4b0b0e5a7a96222">aim at the free press</a>. That brief belongs to Donald J. Trump and the Congress that has fallen in line to help him with the plunder, knowing they’ll get to pocket a portion of the spoils.</p>
<p>It’s not only institutions that Trump, aided and abetted by his Republican helpmeets, is breaking. The longstanding alliances between the United States and the democratic nations of the world are fraying, strained by the bombast and rhetorical abuse exercised by the president. Democrats, meanwhile, move too cautiously, trying to work the peripheral levers of the machinery of their peripheral power, while the hallmarks of a burgeoning authoritarianism permeate the political atmosphere.</p>
<p>On Tuesday, the president promised to announce “awards” next week for the news outlets he deems to be the most untruthful, noting that he would not include Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News in his assessment. <span class="pullquote-right">This is an attack by a sitting president on the First Amendment. </span>The people may not like it, but they’re not about to go out into the streets over it.</p>
<p>Time was when House Speaker Paul Ryan tsk-tsk’d Trump for his <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/07/politics/paul-ryan-donald-trump-racist-comment/index.html">racist rhetoric</a> on the campaign trail. Now Ryan is the president’s best friend. And remember when people thought Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell might be something of a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/06/10/mitch-mcconnell-just-made-a-devastating-admission-about-trump-and-the-gop/?utm_term=.cce9d94c5ca5">check on Trump’s worst inclinations</a>? A little bluster from Breitbart News chief executive Steve Bannon, and McConnell gets the message, delivering an abomination of a tax law.</p>
<p>Consider the case of Orin Hatch, Republican senator from Utah. Once known for being a conservative who could collaborate with Democrats to craft such legislation as the Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Hatch quickly rejected any notion of bipartisan action once Trump took office. That prompted his <a href="http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/editorial/2017/12/25/tribune-editorial-why-orrin-hatch-is-utahn-of-the-year/">hometown paper to demand</a> that Hatch not run again, citing the senator’s “utter lack of integrity that rises from his unquenchable thirst for power.” On Tuesday, Hatch obliged the editors of <em>The Salt Lake Tribune</em>, announcing that he would forego a run for an eighth term.</p>
<p><em>The New York Times</em> reports that Hatch’s exit clears the way for a run by famous #NeverTrump-er Mitt Romney. We’ll see just how #NeverTrump he remains should he gain the mantle of senatorial power.</p>
<p>Yet, however convenient it might be to righteously castigate the complicit Republicans and often-clueless Democrats in Congress, the responsibility ultimately rests with us. <span class="pullquote-right">Authoritarianism is on the march around the world and at the helm of our own nation, and we’re watching it happen.</span></p>
<p>When the history of the end of the republic is written, it may be fairly said that a hostile foreign power helped elect an authoritarian president, and the American people allowed him to stay, only to have the riches of the nation stolen from them.</p>
<p>Unless we don’t. There’s no time to wait. Not for Mueller, not for investigations of investigators. Pressure must be maintained every day—until the president either resigns, or is impeached. Full stop.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 03 Jan 2018 15:42:34 +0000229214 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanOn the Road to Kleptocracyhttp://prospect.org/article/on-road-kleptocracy
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<p><span class="dropcap">W</span>ith the passage of the Republican tax bill, there’s no longer room for doubt: The big heist is on. The looting of the national commons is well underway, and now those behind it feel no need to hide it.</p>
<p>Let’s face it—this is why they allowed President Donald J. Trump to happen. He may not have been the first pick of GOP leaders, who would have preferred a more subtle approach, something that looked more like the invisible hand of the market than outright pillage. But once Trump had the nomination locked up, they fell in line. However ugly things might get, a bonanza awaited the crowd that carried Trump across the White House threshold.</p>
<p>You’ve likely heard by now that <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/18/16791174/republican-tax-bill-congress-conference-tax-policy-center">83 percent of the gains to taxpayers</a> in the bill go to the top 1 percent, ranked by income. How the tax cuts for middle-income earners are modest and temporary, while the cuts for corporations are robust and permanent. How many middle class people in blue states will actually take a hit. How 13 million people are expected to land among the ranks of those with no health insurance, thanks to the monkey wrench thrown into the works of Obamacare through the repeal of the individual mandate. How social programs that allow everyday Americans to get ahead or simply stay alive are set to be starved.</p>
<p>Taken alone, the tax bill is an abomination. Taken in the context of the institution-breaking behavior of this administration, it’s but one battle in a march of conquest. There’s nothing subtle here: The riches of the nation are being stolen from the people.</p>
<p>Consider the planned follow-up to the mere abomination. House Speaker Paul Ryan is promising a “welfare-reform” package that takes aim at Medicare and Medicaid. The tax bill will add $1.5 trillion to the deficit, yet Ryan blames Medicare, the program that keeps older Americans alive and functioning. For years, Ryan has advocated a voucher system to replace Medicare, a system likely designed to allow natural selection to take its course. Who needs weak, frail people, anyway? They’re no longer part of the machinery of production.</p>
<p>Poor people, too, are marked for early death in the ideas floated for the so-called welfare reform package. Medicaid, the program through which poor people obtain health care, will have work requirements if Ryan has his way. If you work for minimum wage and become physically unable to work the three part-time jobs it requires to keep a roof over your family’s head, dispense with any expectation of a long life.</p>
<p>Public lands are being reclassified to allow for the plundering of their resources. The shrinking of the Bears Ears National Monument will be known in history as a pivotal moment in the seizure of the nation’s assets by private and corporate interests, just as it will be recorded as yet one more time white people cheated and harmed Native Americans.</p>
<p>They’re even stealing our words. <span class="pullquote-right">When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/16/health/cdc-banned-words/index.html">forbidden to use</a> the phrase “science-based” in its budget request, something truly sinister is up.</span> Science poses a problem for the administration, because it argues against the looting, putting its costs on display. For good measure, the word “fetus” was also included in the list of seven words the CDC is forbidden to use in the request. You see, the religious right is in on the take. They’ll do their bit to turn out voters for the looters, so long as they get to reshape reality in any way that deprives women and LGBTQ people of their rights. Language shapes reality. In banning the word “fetus,” the administration clearly seeks to scrub the notion of a fetus as something distinct from a “baby.” Banning the word “transgender” serves to erase existence of an entire, scientifically recognized category of vulnerable people. And it dispatched the solicitor general to argue against the civil rights of same-sex couples in a case currently before the Supreme Court.</p>
<p>Right now, the president of the United States owns a hotel in a federal property, in <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/charlestiefer/2017/03/23/the-gsa-approval-of-wrongful-trump-lease-arrangements-whitewashes-cheating-by-his-interests/#220b57f9350c">violation of its lease</a>, which agents of foreign powers apparently feel compelled to patronize, all to the benefit of the president’s own family. The logo on the Trump International Hotel dominates Pennsylvania Avenue. And that’s the little grift. Just a president using a building that belongs to the American people for his own profit.</p>
<p>From its failure to staff the State Department and other agencies to its intimidation of the government’s climate scientists, the Trump administration is taking a sledgehammer to the institutions that maintain any semblance of a humane society. There’s nothing subtle here, no elegant scheme. Just a naked grab for the goods, and the whole of the Republican coalition is in on the take—even those base-level voters who are being economically screwed by the guys they elected. The booty for them is validation of their contempt for people of color and the aspirations of women.</p>
<p>They’re stealing our land. They’re stealing our health. They’re stealing our words.</p>
<p>If we let it continue, they’ll have succeeded in stealing our very souls.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 20 Dec 2017 14:17:41 +0000229123 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanHow Doug Jones’s Alabama Surprise Could Change Everythinghttp://prospect.org/article/how-doug-joness-alabama-surprise-could-change-everything
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<p><span class="dropcap">H</span>ell hath no fury like a predator scorned. And so it was that Roy Moore, the far-right Republican U.S. Senate candidate who Tuesday night lost a special election in Alabama to Democrat Doug Jones, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/13/us/politics/roy-moore-speech-transcript.html">refused to concede</a> to his rival that evening, even after all the major news outlets called the outcome. On the same day, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/12/12/trump-sends-sexually-suggestive-and-demeaning-tweet-about-gillibrand/">insult a high-profile woman senator</a> with sexual innuendo. As <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/12/12/trumps-disgusting-kirsten-gillibrand-tweet-is-just-the-beginning-of-the-metoo-backlash/?utm_term=.f1b99094edd8">Paul Waldman noted</a>, Trump all but shouted, “Whore!”</p>
<p>Moore and Trump, on the surface, have little in common, Trump being an areligious, foul-mouthed New Yorker, and Moore being a performatively pious Southerner. But they are bonded by an experience they share: a chorus of female voices aimed at them, the voices of women with credible stories of having been groped, forcibly kissed, stalked, and more.</p>
<p>In Moore’s case, the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/woman-says-roy-moore-initiated-sexual-encounter-when-she-was-14-he-was-32/2017/11/09/1f495878-c293-11e7-afe9-4f60b5a6c4a0_story.html?utm_term=.e3098b4b4520">women who allege these assaults</a> and transgressions were teenagers at the time of the stalking and/or assault, while he was in his thirties; in Trump’s case, only <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/kendalltaggart/teen-beauty-queens-say-trump-walked-in-on-them-changing?utm_term=.knV6qO32V#.mkm1MAgxO">some of his 16 accusers</a> were teenagers at the time he allegedly took liberties.</p>
<p>In the mind of Donald Trump lurks an insult, always ready to leap onto his tongue, an insult even more devastating, by his sensibilities, than any implication of sex for sale by a woman senator: that of “Loser!” Trump was Moore’s belated champion, initially keeping his distance from the Republican candidate, then stepping in at the eleventh hour to endorse him.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Moore’s loss to Democrat Doug Jones renders Trump a big loser on several levels. </span>First of all, this is Alabama, y’all—a state that Trump overwhelmingly won against Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Accusations of Trump’s sexualized transgressions of women were well known by then, and Trump himself had been heard on tape bragging of his right to sexually assault women by dint of his celebrity.</p>
<p>Misogyny was baked into his brand. There are people who voted for him because of it, not in spite of it. Maybe a lot of them. It’s tempting to read Moore’s loss as the tarnishing of misogyny as a selling point, a thought that should make Trump nervous when calculating his chances for 2020. I hope it does, but that’s not exactly what’s happening here: <a href="http://www.cnn.com/election/2017/results/alabama-senate?q=2017embed">63 percent of white women</a> in the electorate voted for Moore. A majority—94 percent—of Moore voters sampled <a href="http://www.cnn.com/election/2017/results/alabama-senate?q=2017embed">told pollsters</a> they didn’t believe the accusations against Moore.</p>
<p>Jones’s victory largely belongs to Alabama’s African American community, which mobilized a massive turnout operation for the Democrat. As chief justice of the state supreme court, Moore had argued against removing segregationist language from the state constitution; as a federal prosecutor, Jones had brought to justice two of the Klansmen who, in 1963, bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four black girls.</p>
<p>Then there were educated whites, suburbanites typically regarded as swing voters, who couldn’t quite bring themselves to pull the lever for Moore. (The white working class, meanwhile, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/election/2017/results/alabama-senate?q=2017embed">stuck by</a> Trump’s man.)</p>
<p>In Moore’s loss, Trump also loses a Republican vote in a Senate so closely divided that Jones’s victory shaves the GOP margin to one vote. For the next few years, Trump should expect few legislative victories.</p>
<p>Most notable among those who saddled the GOP with Moore as their candidate in the general election is Steve Bannon, who not only supported Moore’s primary challenge to Luther Strange, the incumbent senator appointed to the seat when Jeff Sessions resigned it in order to become attorney general, but who adamantly stuck by Moore after the allegations of Moore’s “dates” with and assaults of teenage girls were <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/woman-says-roy-moore-initiated-sexual-encounter-when-she-was-14-he-was-32/2017/11/09/1f495878-c293-11e7-afe9-4f60b5a6c4a0_story.html?utm_term=.e3098b4b4520">reported by <em>The Washington Post</em></a>. Bannon, the chief executive of Breitbart and Trump’s former White House strategist, has been trying to seize power for himself by challenging the Republican establishment, especially as personified by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who backed Strange in the primary, and called on Moore to step aside once the allegations against him burst onto the front page of the <em>Post</em>.</p>
<p>Bannon’s power stems from two sources: His ability to manipulate Trump, and the largesse of hedge-fund honcho Robert Mercer and his heirs. But on Tuesday, Bannon made Trump into a big old loser, a wound Trump will likely not forget. And having failed in his strategy for world domination through the election of an alleged molester, who knows how long the Mercers will continue to see Bannon as their vehicle?</p>
<p>Meanwhile, as America faces its reckoning on its institutionalized sexual oppression of women, Trump is confronted with his own history once again, as women who made credible allegations against him during the presidential campaign again <a href="https://www.bravenewfilms.org/16women">resurfaced</a> (here in a video by Brave New Films) to reassert their claims. It was this that prompted U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, a likely contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, to call on the president to resign on December 11, eliciting the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/12/12/trump-sends-sexually-suggestive-and-demeaning-tweet-about-gillibrand/">Twitter insult</a> from Trump.</p>
<p><iframe allow="encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" gesture="media" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/P2lMN3kIjAA" width="560"></iframe></p>
<p>Because here’s the thing: Now that the public is becoming more accustomed to powerful men losing their posts due to sexual crimes and misdemeanors conducted against women, a case for the impeachment of Donald J. Trump broadens. The impeachment case against Trump needn’t be predicated simply on whether or not his campaign committed crimes or colluded with Russia. It needn’t prove a crime. The tribal affinity for Trump among majorities of white women in particular states should not deter the Democrats from making the case based in part on his treatment of women, and his braggadocious misogyny. The culture at large is bending under the weight of such allegations against men of high office and handsome payment.</p>
<p>However unlikely it may be that the House of Representatives, with its Republican majority based on ruthlessly gerrymandered maps, would ever vote to pass articles of impeachment, the case must be continuously made. And if Trump is ultimately pushed from office, it will be African Americans and Democratic women of all colors (but especially African American women) who will make it happen. To dismiss them as purveyors of “identity politics” is to simply display the institutional biases the Democratic Party is supposed to guard against. This coalition is the party’s present—and its future. Get used to it.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 13 Dec 2017 15:11:46 +0000229086 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanTrent Franks, Al Franken, and The Handmaid’s Talehttp://prospect.org/article/trent-franks-al-franken-and-handmaid%E2%80%99s-tale
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<p>Representative Trent Franks takes his seat before the start of a House Judiciary hearing on Capitol Hill </p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">C</span>all me Roy Rogers; for the last year and a half I’ve been riding a horse named <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_(horse)">Trigger</a>. I’m hardly what you’d call a snowflake. I’ve been around this block a few times, by virtue of being female and on the earth for a while. But the torrent of revelations of sexual assault and harassment by men in high places has led countless women like me—women who have experienced one or both of those transgressions—into a prolonged state of hypervigilance, as the world learned of a range of techniques and degrees for the sexual subjugation of women in the workplace, be it an ass-grab, a masturbation display, or an all-out assault. If you’ve been subjected to anything like this yourself, you’re now reliving it every damn day.</p>
<p>But here’s one I hadn’t counted on: the boss asking his employee if she’d like to have his baby. That’s what Representative Trent Franks, who resigned his seat after House Speaker Paul Ryan launched an ethics investigation into Franks’s behavior toward two female staffers, is said to have done. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/rep-trent-franks-of-arizona-is-expected-to-resign/2017/12/07/479d156a-db9f-11e7-b859-fb0995360725_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_franks6pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&amp;utm_term=.0f8644a3f8f5">According to <em>The Washington Post</em></a>, Franks asked each of the women if they would be willing to act as a pregnancy surrogate for him and his wife. To break that down to its horror: He asked his employees to gestate his sperm in their bodies. If that ain’t patriarchy, I don’t know what is.</p>
<p>The <em>Post</em> reports that the House Ethics Committee had planned to investigate conduct by Franks “that constitutes sexual harassment and/or retaliation for opposing sexual harassment.” Now we may never find out if Franks retaliated against either of these women for refusing to carry and give birth to his child, which is really something beyond behavior “that constitutes sexual harassment.” It’s an order of magnitude more horrifying. It’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/books/review/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-age-of-trump.html"><em>The Handmaid’s Tale</em></a>. (It’s not for nothing that Franks is so intent on policing women’s bodies, being one of the most punitive among the House’s anti-choice caucus, having led the charge to outlaw any abortion for virtually any reason past 20 weeks of gestation.)</p>
<p>In the hours before the Franks story broke in the House, on the other side of the Capitol, the Democrats were about to lose one of their most progressive senators to allegations that he groped and forcibly kissed women during his days as a progressive radio host and comic. <span class="pullquote-right">Al Franken’s resignation was maddening on any number of levels</span>—for his lack of grace and refusal to accept personal responsibility for the situation that led his colleagues to call for his resignation, but also for the political circumstances that led to this moment.</p>
<p>Senator Al Franken of Minnesota may be a jerk, and groping or forcibly kissing women should never be acceptable. But the takedown of Franken feels like payback for the special prosecutor investigation that President Donald J. Trump, the self-described pussy-grabber, is currently enduring regarding meddling by the Russian Federation in the U.S. election that yielded him the White House, and the possible involvement of members of his campaign and transition team in the plot.</p>
<p>During the confirmation hearing of Jeff Sessions, then a U.S. senator from Alabama, to the cabinet post of attorney general, <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/92699303-132.html">Franken pressed Sessions</a> on any knowledge he may have with regard to interaction with people connected to the Russian government. After Sessions’s answer to Franken was found to have been false, Sessions felt compelled to recuse himself from overseeing the Justice Department’s Russia investigation, which gave way to the appointment of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller. The special prosecutor has been making life rather anxious for Trump, his family, and his associates, especially now with the guilty plea of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, whom Trump has sought to protect—even allegedly asking then-FBI Director James Comey to go easy on Flynn.</p>
<p>Sessions was championed for the attorney general position by former Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon, the propagandist and former White House strategist, the man behind the quest of Roy Moore, alleged assaulter of teenage girls, to win the Senate seat formerly held by Sessions. And here by “assault” I mean being in his 30s, offering a 16-year-old a ride home from her job, and then locking her in the car while he threw himself on her. Or taking a 14-year-old to his home and removing her clothes, and putting his hands on her.</p>
<p>On the day before the first allegations against Franken of grabby assaults (yes, a grab is an assault, as is an inappropriate, unwanted, and surprising kiss), Trump adviser and dirty trickster Roger Stone <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/roger-stone-appears-to-have-known-about-al-franken-allegations-hours-before-they-went-public/">announced via Twitter</a> that it would “soon be Franken’s time in the barrel,” using the same language <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/the-wikileaks-tweets-roger-stone-cant-explain-1/">he deployed</a> to announce a bad outcome for “the Podesta’s” [sic] just ahead of a WikiLeaks dump of emails hacked from the personal account of John Podesta, who was then chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.</p>
<p>Yes, we’re having a moment of national reckoning, and that is welcome. And it is changing, on a daily basis, the make-up of society’s most significant institutions. Without structural change, though, I fear we will just get more of the same.</p>
<p>Right now, major structural change that is beneficial to society in general and women in particular is the saving of the nation from the authoritarian, democracy-breaking, kleptocratic regime that has seized power, likely with the help of Vladimir Putin, president of the authoritarian and kleptocratic Russian Federation. At <em>Slate</em>, <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/12/the_republicans_have_built_an_uneven_playing_field_of_morality.html">Dahlia Lithwick notes</a> that Democrats do themselves no favors in abiding by traditional norms in a time when nothing is normal.</p>
<p>So bid Al Franken farewell. He was a good senator, but he’s not irreplaceable. But hold onto your horses, and keep your eyes wide open. Don’t get played. </p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 08 Dec 2017 15:26:47 +0000229063 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanGuys Like Matt Lauer Are Why We Have President Trumphttp://prospect.org/article/guys-matt-lauer-are-why-we-have-president-trump
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<p><em>Today </em>co-anchor Matt Lauer appears before the NBC Commander-in-Chief Forum on September 7, 2016.</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">U</span>ntil this morning, <em>Today</em> show anchor Matt Lauer was one of the highest-paid people in television, with an estimated annual salary north of <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/lauer-net-worth-salary-millions-725524">$20 million</a>. Today, he’s out of a job because of, <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/29/media/matt-lauer/index.html">in the words of NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack</a>, <strong>“</strong>inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace.<strong>”</strong></p>
<p>While we’ve yet to learn of just what kind of <strong>“</strong>inappropriate sexual behavior” Lauer stands accused, we do know that he’s a sexist jerk who <a href="http://prospect.org/article/how-sexism-matt-lauer%E2%80%99s-could-imperil-nation">imperiled the nation</a> because of his sexism. Because when you’re one of the highest-paid people in television news, you really can imperil the nation through your biases.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Lauer was one among a group of mighty newsmen who, during the 2016 presidential campaign, sought to paint Hillary Clinton as duplicitous and deceptive—charges reserved for women since that time the men who wrote the Bible invented Eve.</span> Others include Mark Halperin and Glenn Thrush, whose names may be fresh in your mind, thanks to allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct against them.</p>
<p>While Halperin rejects allegations that he ever assaulted anybody, he has apologized for behaving badly. (He is <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/27/media/mark-halperin-new-accusations/index.html">accused</a> of hitting one woman, and throwing another against the window of a restaurant before forcing a kiss on her. That’s in addition to accusations of <a href="http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-masturbation-weinstein-toback-ratner-louis-ck-halperin-20171114-story.html">masturbating</a> in front of one woman colleague, and <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/25/media/mark-halperin-sexual-harassment-allegations/index.html">rubbing his genitals</a> against three others.) <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/20/16678094/glenn-thrush-new-york-times">Allegations against Thrush</a>, which are of a lesser order for behavior not exhibited in the workplace, are currently being investigated by his employer, <em>The New York Times</em>, which has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/business/media/glenn-thrush-sexual-misconduct.html">suspended</a> him while the investigation is under way. Charges against Halperin, a bestselling author who was a frequent commentator on cable news programs, were first reported by CNN, and pertain to his time as a lead journalist at ABC News.</p>
<p>On September 7, 2016, Lauer hosted a forum featuring Clinton and Trump that was to have focused on how each presidential candidate would approach the role of commander-in-chief. As I <a href="http://prospect.org/article/how-sexism-matt-lauer%E2%80%99s-could-imperil-nation">wrote</a> at the time, Lauer held each candidate to completely different standards, dwelling at length on Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state—a situation already litigated in the press and of which an FBI investigation had found no breach of national security, and which the candidate had herself admitted as an error of judgment. In fact, Lauer directed one-third of Clinton’s screen time during the forum to this very issue, rather than the many burning foreign policy issues consuming the world at the time, issues on which she had exponentially higher levels of expertise than Trump. Meanwhile, Lauer never challenged Trump on his <a href="https://www.alternet.org/election-2016/incensed-spotlight-hillary-trump-vies-attention-act-near-treason">call for the Russian Federation to hack the contents of Clinton’s private server</a>.</p>
<p>From that September 2016 <a href="http://prospect.org/article/how-sexism-matt-lauer%E2%80%99s-could-imperil-nation">column</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>When questioning Clinton, Lauer was all alpha-male, interrupting her and tsk-tsking her for criticizing her opponent after he had asked her not to do so. But when paired with Trump, it became clear who was the alpha in that set-up. It clearly wasn't Lauer, who allowed Trump to talk over him, and to evade specifics. When Trump criticized Clinton, Lauer allowed him to slide.</p>
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<p>The following day, <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/halperin-clinton-needs-to-address-questions-760334915635">Halperin appeared on MSNBC’s <em>Morning Joe</em></a>, taking issue with co-host Joe Scarborough’s contention that Clinton should have just refused to devote as much time to the email server question as Lauer demanded.</p>
<p>“As a journalist and as an American, I can’t advocate that and say, yeah, that’s what she should do because there are unanswered questions,” <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/halperin-clinton-needs-to-address-questions-760334915635">Halperin said</a>. “I don’t think you can say, sorry, I did it and then spend time explaining why you did nothing wrong.”</p>
<p>“As a journalist and as an American”! How ’bout as a sexist pig? Because that’s what this was really about. I mean, as a journalist and an American, how could you not expect the host of a candidate forum about commander-in-chiefing to question a candidate about his appeal to a hostile power for intervention in the U.S. election campaign, or about his <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/us/politics/donald-trump-khizr-khan-wife-ghazala.html">smearing of a Gold Star family</a>? Oh, when he’s the <em>man</em> who’s running against the <em>woman</em>. Funny how guys with reputations for abusing women don’t want a woman to be in charge of the armed forces.</p>
<p>As <em>New York</em> magazine’s Rebecca Traister noted last month, Halperin’s gendered narrative about Clinton began long ago. <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2017/10/halperin-wieseltier-weinstein-powerful-lecherous-men.html">She wrote</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>Mark Halperin co-authored <em>Game Change,</em> the soapy account of the 2008 election (<a href="http://nymag.com/news/politics/63045/">excerpted in this magazine</a>), which featured all kinds of history-making candidates who were not powerful white men. Halperin’s view of Hillary Clinton in particular was two-dimensional: Through his lens, she was a grasping and scandal-plagued woman; her exaggerated misdeeds and the intense feelings she engendered were all part of propelling his profitable narrative forward. His coverage of Trump, meanwhile, in this last campaign cycle, was notably soft, even admiring: Halperin once argued that the sexual-assault claims leveled at Trump would only help the now-president’s brand.</p>
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<p>As for Thrush, who is accused of planting unwanted kisses on colleagues in barrooms, <a href="https://rantt.com/how-misogynistic-male-reporters-shaped-the-coverage-of-the-2016-election-1395e41e4738">Remy Anne of Rantt notes</a> a piece by Thrush that ran the day before the candidate forum in which Lauer tipped the scales in favor of the male candidate.</p>
<blockquote><p>On September 6, 2016 Glenn Thrush wrote an <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/is-hillary-clinton-losing-227774" target="_blank">article</a> for <em>Politico </em>entitled “Five reasons Hillary could be blowing it.” The piece detailed the top five reasons, according to Thrush, as to why “Clinton let Trump back into the race.”</p>
<p>These points included the thoughts that Trump was getting his messaging together, Clinton was plagued with scandal, and—every woman’s favorite criticism—her personality sucked.</p>
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<p>These guys were not simply a danger to the women they worked with; they endangered all of us, male and female alike. One need only look to the current occupant of the Oval Office to see the result. Oh, and that guy made a backhanded defense of Lauer this morning <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/935844881825763328">on Twitter</a>, by way of jabbing Lauer’s boss—and the free press:</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en">Wow, Matt Lauer was just fired from NBC for “inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace.” But when will the top executives at NBC &amp; Comcast be fired for putting out so much Fake News. Check out Andy Lack’s past!</p>
<p>— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/935844881825763328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 29, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<script async="" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><p>So, fellas, as a journalist and an American, let me say, hey, thanks for the fascist you helped put in the White House. There’s nothing so sexist as a fascist. You must be proud!</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 29 Nov 2017 16:42:29 +0000229000 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanThis Is What Patriarchy Looks Likehttp://prospect.org/article/what-patriarchy-looks
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<p>Roy Moore waits to speak at a news conference on November 16, 2017, in Birmingham, Alabama.</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>here’s an <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/20/politics/al-franken-inappropriate-touch-2010/index.html">alleged ass-grabber</a> in the Senate and a self-described <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html">pussy-grabber</a> in the White House. In Alabama, an alleged <a href="https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/ephebophilia">ephebophile</a> who stands accused of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/16/timeline-the-accusations-against-roy-moore/">assaulting young women</a>—including one as young as 14—is running for a seat in the Senate. He enjoys <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/21/trump-roy-moore-support-255353">support</a> of the pussy-grabber in the Oval Office.</p>
<p>The “dean of the House” <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/paulmcleod/she-complained-that-a-powerful-congressman-harassed-her?utm_term=.nszpozvaR#.knV6qO32V">paid $27,000</a> in taxpayer dollars to a woman who accused him of sexually harassing her; he stands accused of harassing other staffers, as well. The congressional Office of Compliance has paid some <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/21/congress-sexual-harassment-slush-fund-255547?lo=ap_b1">$17 million in public funds since 1997 to settle workplace disputes</a>, according to <em>Politico</em>’s Elana Schor; unknown are the number of those that involve allegations of sexual harassment.</p>
<p>And this is just a snapshot of our current moment of reckoning in politics. Add in the allegations, admissions, and apologies from the worlds of entertainment and journalism, and you’d be forgiven for turning a skeptical eye on virtually any man who’s ever occupied a position of power in our society.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">In the real lives of everyday women, though, these affronts and crimes are not merely the prerogative of society’s most powerful; they often seem like the prerogative of any man, anywhere.</span></p>
<p>Take the guy driving down the street in my neighborhood where I walked, on my way to a friend’s house. He slowed down, rolled down his passenger-side window, and asked for directions. As I walked over to the car to tell him where to make a turn, I noticed that his pants were down around his ankles. I was 17.</p>
<p>Then there was the pizzeria owner who grabbed my breast in a mocking way in front of a table of men. I was a 16-year-old waitress. Then there was the guy who raped me in college, the several ass-grabs and breast-grabs I’ve endured for daring to walk in public, and the guy who rubbed his dick against my shoulder as I sat on a crowded bus and he stood in the aisle. When I bellowed my discontent, the driver told me to calm down or get off the bus. Don’t even get me started on the cat-calling.</p>
<p>This is what patriarchy looks like. And this is just patriarchy in its more sexualized form, absent the quotidian indignities of the pay gap, the glass ceiling, of having one’s work alternately disparaged and appropriated.</p>
<p>Patriarchy is neither Democrat nor Republican. It is a system engaged in by people of all races, though it must be said that the dominant race in any society is likely to have a corner on the market, by virtue of its power. In America, that means that women who are not white are even more vulnerable to its theft of labor, creativity, and spirit.</p>
<p>It’s difficult to imagine a system more patriarchal than the one on which the U.S. economy was founded—that of chattel slavery. Plantation owners raped the women they enslaved, then enslaved any children resulting from those assaults, often using them as house servants in the domain of the gentleman farmer’s wife. This is our legacy, the part we don’t talk about. It courses silently through the veins of the body politic.</p>
<p>Seeing as how the Republican Party has become the home of neo-Confederates—of such people as Alabama’s U.S. Senate hopeful Roy Moore, who <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/roy-moore-led-charge-against-removing-segregation-from-alabama-constitution">opposed the removal of segregation provisions</a> from the state constitution—the depth of this legacy in both parties must not be allowed to overshadow its exercise in law, ideology, and tribalism. The sexism and misogyny found among Democrats is rightfully derided as hypocritical, since Democrats claim to stand for equality—of race, of sex, of sexual orientation and identity, of religion. But the sexism and misogyny (and racism and queerphobia) of Republicans these days is part of the brand, a rallying cry. There’s a self-described pussy-grabber in the White House. You’d have to conclude that a lot of the people who voted for him liked that about him, just as they liked the false crime statistics he tweeted about African Americans, his description of Mexicans as rapists, and his smearing of all Muslims as potential terrorists. They like it all, because it’s all of a piece.</p>
<p>Our choices being less than optimum, they are nonetheless stark. As for me, I’m sticking with the hypocrites.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 22 Nov 2017 15:40:45 +0000228968 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanRoy Moore Proves the Moral Bankruptcy of the Religious Righthttp://prospect.org/article/roy-moore-proves-moral-bankruptcy-religious-right
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<p>Roy Moore speaks at a revival on November 14, 2017, in Jackson, Alabama.</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">H</span>e is a judge who was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/01/us/roy-moore-alabama-chief-justice.html">suspended from his position</a> as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court for failing to uphold the Constitution of the United States. But that wasn’t enough to keep Roy Moore from winning the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. If anything, it was Moore’s defiance in the face of a federal court decision mandating that government officials issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples that won him the love of the Alabamians who turned out to vote for him.</p>
<p>Or maybe it was that time in 2003 when Moore <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/11/13/moore.tencommandments/">lost his seat on the court</a> for refusing to remove a 2.6-ton monument of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse—a monument whose placement Moore had overseen. Take that, First Amendment!</p>
<p>It’s been these kind of antics that have won Moore the admiration of self-described Christians on the right side of the political spectrum. And while the Ten Commandments forbid the coveting of one’s neighbor’s wife, they say nothing of the neighbor’s daughter. So while Republican leaders and elected officials <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/14/moore-senate-republicans-expulsion-244907">slowly assemble</a> in opposition to Moore’s candidacy in the December 12 special election, significant and politically active right-wing evangelical Christian leaders have either maintained silence or defended Moore in the wake of allegations that he <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/13/politics/gloria-allred-roy-moore-alabama/index.html">assaulted two</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/woman-says-roy-moore-initiated-sexual-encounter-when-she-was-14-he-was-32/2017/11/09/1f495878-c293-11e7-afe9-4f60b5a6c4a0_story.html">teenage girls</a> when he was in his 30s, and pursued “relationships” with an additional three teenagers.</p>
<p>At the Values Voter Summit hosted last month by FRC Action, the political arm of the Family Research Council, Moore was presented as a star to a conference audience of right-wing Christian political activists, who cheered him with gusto. There he delivered a largely incoherent speech complaining of how America had lost its way. During a luncheon address to a smaller group earlier in the day, Moore called for the impeachment of the justices on the U.S. Supreme Court who wrote the majority opinion that legalized same-sex marriage, according to a <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/roy-moore-pro-marriage-equality-justices-should-be-impeached/">report</a> by Peter Montgomery of Right Wing Watch. In fact, Moore believes that sexual relations between consenting adults of the same sex should be illegal, according to Montgomery. <span class="pullquote-right">But sexual relations between an adult man and a teenage girl, whether she’s reached the age of consent <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/woman-says-roy-moore-initiated-sexual-encounter-when-she-was-14-he-was-32/2017/11/09/1f495878-c293-11e7-afe9-4f60b5a6c4a0_story.html">or not</a>, well that’s apparently the way God intended things to be.</span></p>
<p>Although Moore denies the allegations made by <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/13/politics/gloria-allred-roy-moore-alabama/index.html">five</a> <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/woman-says-roy-moore-initiated-sexual-encounter-when-she-was-14-he-was-32/2017/11/09/1f495878-c293-11e7-afe9-4f60b5a6c4a0_story.html">women</a> over the last several days that he sought dates or sex from them when they were teenagers and he was a thirtysomething district attorney, in an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News, Moore did not flat-out deny that he sought to date teenagers during that time in his life. He simply said that he “generally” didn’t seek such relationships. Now, even Hannity has <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/15/hannity-moore-alabama-allegations-244913">revoked his support</a> for Moore.</p>
<p>Yet not a peep has been heard from Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. Not a word about Moore appears in recent posts on either the Family Research Council or FRC Action websites, the latter of which still shows a <a href="https://blog.frcaction.org/2017/09/frc-action-pac-endorses-judge-roy-moore-united-states-senate-sept-18/">press release</a> announcing FRC Action’s endorsement of Moore. “These are challenging times and our nation is looking for bold leadership,” reads a quote from Perkins in the release. FRC Action PAC Vice President Jerry Boykin adds, “Judge Roy Moore has been a fearless champion of conservative values and a great friend to the Family Research Council. It is a true privilege to endorse him for the U.S. Senate. I have no doubt that Judge Moore will follow his conscience and not be swayed by political correctness or political expediency.”</p>
<p>On November 13, American Family Association official Sandy Rios defended Moore. Speaking on her radio program, Rios said, <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/sandy-rios-downplays-roy-moore-allegations-what-man-doesnt-have-something-hes-ashamed-of-sexually/">according to Right Wing Watch</a>, “Honestly, do you think there’s a person alive on the planet—certainly, I’ll limit it a little bit, I will say any man listening to my voice—that doesn’t have something in his past, in his box of secrets, that he’s ashamed of sexually?” Rios asked. “Especially, let’s just say, beginning in the ’60s.”</p>
<p>And <em>The Washington Post</em> reports that in Alabama, state-level Republican officials are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/paul-ryan-joins-gop-calls-for-roy-moore-to-end-campaign-amid-sexual-misconduct-allegations/2017/11/14/65a4c824-c951-11e7-aa96-54417592cf72_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_mooregop-935p%3Ahomepage%2Fs">sticking with Moore</a>, regardless of the call by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for Moore to exit the Senate race. Failing that, McConnell predicted that Moore would be expelled from the Senate if seated, a move that would require a two-thirds vote of the body.</p>
<p>The Moore candidacy for Senate never was McConnell’s idea of a good move; in the primary, McConnell, like President Donald J. Trump, endorsed the incumbent Senator Luther Strange, who was appointed to the post when Sessions vacated his seat to join the Trump administration. But Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump campaign CEO and White House strategist who now leads Breitbart News, saw the Moore candidacy as a tool in his proxy war against McConnell, whose Senate leadership Bannon <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/11/us/politics/mitch-mcconnell-steve-bannon-trump.html">told <em>The New York Times</em></a> he’d like to end. It’s all part of Bannon’s grand plan to wed Breitbart’s alt-right fan base to the religious right, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/09/05/steve-bannons-grand-disruptive-designs-are-only-getting-started/?utm_term=.e9e485151396">according to reporter Sarah Posner</a>, for maximum political effect.</p>
<p>If there were any doubt that religious-right leaders such as Perkins and Rios are more about the politics than Christian love, their respective silence on or defense of Moore lays that doubt to rest.</p>
<p>As Moore himself <a href="http://billmoyers.com/story/white-nationalism-values-voter-summit/">told the Values Voter Summit</a> audience in a verse he penned himself, “You think that God’s not angry that our land’s a moral slum? How much longer will it be before his judgment comes?” </p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 15 Nov 2017 15:25:22 +0000228930 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanWill Bannon Scare Republicans into Shutting Down Mueller?http://prospect.org/article/will-bannon-scare-republicans-shutting-down-mueller
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<p><span class="dropcap">“</span>The Republicans are like church mice,” Breitbart News honcho Stephen K. Bannon <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-resists-mounting-pressure-from-bannon-and-others-to-fight-mueller/2017/10/31/22b02ce0-be4b-11e7-97d9-bdab5a0ab381_story.html?utm_term=.463d6f380675">told <em>The Washington Post</em></a> on Tuesday. “No support of the president. Totally gutless. The Hill needs to step up.”</p>
<p>Two months ago, talk like that from Bannon might have been written off by congressional Republicans as standard-issue bloviation from the former White House strategist and Trump campaign CEO. But since Bannon got into the Senate campaign game, two U.S. senators from the president’s own party have already decided not to run for re-election after Bannon threatened to back challengers in their respective GOP primary contests. Having already helped defeat the incumbent senator in the Alabama primary, Bannon’s fightin’ words carry a bit more weight than they might have before a <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/roy-moore-led-charge-against-removing-segregation-from-alabama-constitution">theocratic, Constitution-flouting</a> former state supreme court judge became the party’s candidate for the <a href="https://statesymbolsusa.org/symbol/alabama/state-nickname/yellowhammer-state">Yellowhammer State</a>’s suddenly open seat.</p>
<p>Since the indictment of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and two other campaign members earlier this week, <span class="pullquote-right">Capitol Hill has become a place with an edgy feel. Thing is, no one knows just exactly where that edge is.</span> Special Counsel Robert Mueller moves stealthily and strategically in his investigation of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and of the possibility that the Trump campaign may have been in cahoots with their candidate’s favorite dictator, Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin.</p>
<p>Republicans in Congress, particularly in the Senate, find themselves having to walk a line. That may account for Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley’s expressed appreciation of Mueller as a “very ethical person,” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-resists-mounting-pressure-from-bannon-and-others-to-fight-mueller/2017/10/31/22b02ce0-be4b-11e7-97d9-bdab5a0ab381_story.html?utm_term=.463d6f380675">according to <em>Politico</em></a>—even as he urges the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the approval of a merger of the Russian company Rosatom with Canada-based Uranium One. At the time of the deal, it was estimated that Uranium One’s licensing rights represented 20 percent of U.S. uranium production capacity; <em>The Washington Post</em>’s Fact Checker has since said <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/10/31/the-repeated-incorrect-claim-that-russia-obtained-20-percent-of-our-uranium/?utm_term=.645498eef9da">the figure is closer to 10 percent</a>. (The uranium, designated for use in nuclear power plants, is barred from being exported, so it’s not as if Russia could rob the United States of its uranium stores.)</p>
<p>Any special counsel investigation of <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/31/16581234/hillary-clinton-uranium-one-russia-scandal-trump">the Uranium One transaction</a> could be the baldest attempt at Republican what-aboutism—a deflection technique by which one tries to conflate an opponent’s behavior with one’s own misdeeds. The opponent in question is, of course, Hillary Clinton, against whom President Donald J. Trump still appears to be running if, for nothing else, to satisfy his base and a very important pair of backers—billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebecca—who also happen to be the people behind Bannon. It was Bannon’s Government Accountability Institute, working with Mercer money, that first introduced into the presidential campaign the notion that because, as secretary of state, Clinton was one of nine officials who sat on the board that approves such deals when they involve foreign entities, it must have been her idea, and she must have gotten something for her trouble from the Russians. It was GAI that first crafted that narrative in Peter Schweizer’s book, <em>Clinton Cash</em>.</p>
<p>While some of the right’s loudest voices are calling for either Mueller’s firing or his resignation—most notably, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-russians-and-the-fbi-1508971759"><em>The Wall Street Journal</em></a> in an unsigned editorial—senators such as Grassley are looking at another way to skin the cat.</p>
<p>“I don’t know how you could improve things by interfering [in the Mueller investigation],” Grassley told <em>The Washington Post</em> on Tuesday. “The process just ought to go.” In fact, <span class="pullquote-right">Grassley is so keen on special prosecutors that he <a href="https://twitter.com/chuckgrassley/status/922999641171357696">took to Twitter</a> on October 24 to call for appointing one in the Uranium One matter.</span> For good measure, he took an oblique swipe at Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from any investigation having to do with Russia and its agents. Grassley contends that Rosenstein himself is compromised for having prosecuted an official at a different Rosatom subsidiary, Tenex, for bribery—a prosecution that Grassley, at a <a href="https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/10/18/2017/oversight-of-the-us-department-of-justice">recent oversight hearing of the Justice Department</a>, suggested did not go far enough.</p>
<p>Whether that’s enough to placate Bannon and the Mercers is hard to tell. But one big surprise from the Mueller investigation so far is one that has a lot of people nervous. While the indictment of Manafort was expected, and that of Manafort business partner Rick Gates not a shocker, an indictment of campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that was unsealed after the two bigger fish were caught is causing serious <em>agita</em>, seeing as how Papadopoulos was named as a “proactive cooperator” who has been working with investigators for months. Mueller nailed Papadopoulos for lying to the FBI about the nature of his conversations with a U.K.-based professor who claimed to have links to the Kremlin and possible access to “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of emails. Many are wondering if, while cooperating with investigators, Papadopoulos talked to former campaign mates while wearing a wire.</p>
<p>Bannon seems especially nervous. On October 30, the day the indictments were unsealed and Manafort and Gates turned themselves in, CNN’s Dana Bash reported that sources told her Bannon was urging Trump to do everything he could to slow down the Mueller probe, including <a href="https://twitter.com/DanaBashCNN/status/925187455992680449?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&amp;ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fthehill.com%2Fhomenews%2Fadministration%2F357950-bannon-pushing-trump-to-take-action-on-mueller-reports">withholding documents</a>. Wonder what he’s got to worry about.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 01 Nov 2017 17:05:54 +0000228838 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanIn Flake, Bannon Claims Another Victimhttp://prospect.org/article/flake-bannon-claims-another-victim
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<p>Senator Jeff Flake, accompanied by his wife, Cheryl, leaves the Capitol on October 24 after announcing he won't seek re-election.</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">F</span>or progressives and liberals, it is tempting to eye the current discord and disarray in the Republican Party with a sense of amusement, if not outright glee. But the current trend of divisive loyalty tests for national political candidates poses a grave danger to the nation, especially when imposed by an ally of an authoritarian administration that regularly demonstrates contempt for the institutions and norms of representative democracy.</p>
<p>Senator Jeff Flake was never much for Donald Trump. Flake, a libertarian, didn’t support Trump’s presidential bid, and has been a constant critic of the president since from the administration’s outset, even <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073TJYBRN/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&amp;btkr=1">writing a book</a> about how Trump is destroying conservatism (a phenomenon <a href="http://prospect.org/article/donald-trump-and-twilight-movement-conservatism">we noted</a> during the primary campaign). Steve Bannon, the propagandist and former White House strategist turned kingmaker, promised to back a primary challenger to Flake, the U.S. senator from Arizona who would have been up for re-election next year. Yesterday, Flake folded, announcing, in a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/us/politics/jeff-flake-transcript-senate-speech.html?action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;region=CColumn&amp;module=MostViewed&amp;version=Full&amp;src=mv&amp;WT.nav=MostViewed">speech on the Senate floor</a>, that he would not seek another term because he would not be complicit in the “casual undermining of our democratic ideals” as executed by President Trump.</p>
<p>If Flake uses the platform he still possesses for the next 14 months to gather other Republicans to challenge the legitimacy of the Trump presidency, that would be a good thing. But the danger inherent in the means by which Flake was pushed out of his seat poses nearly as great a threat to the republic as the Trump presidency itself, and possibly one with a much longer life.</p>
<p>As <em>Prospect</em> co-editor Robert Kuttner <a href="http://www.npr.org/2017/10/25/559963926/steve-bannons-war-against-establishment-republicans">noted on NPR’s <em>Morning Edition</em></a> on Wednesday, Bannon may not be able to rule the Republican Party, but he can divide it. And it is through that division that Bannon can fundamentally alter the party’s DNA to favor authoritarian candidates who offer no pretense of regard for the tenets of the U.S. Constitution, or any of the norms or institutions of representative democracy. <span class="pullquote-right">In a binary system such as ours, the republic is gravely threatened when the members of one of the two major political parties risk ouster-via-primary for insufficient loyalty to an authoritarian executive. </span></p>
<p>Bannon likes to cast his own political philosophy—and the president’s—as one of “economic nationalism,” defined by the imposition of tariffs, a retreat from an international human-rights agenda, and opposition to multilateral trade deals. But the truth is, <a href="http://prospect.org/article/white-nationalism-and-economic-nationalism-0">as Kuttner writes</a> in the Fall issue of the magazine, Bannon’s brand of “economic nationalism” feeds on what has come to be known as “white nationalism”—a noxious blend of racism and isolationism that casts so-called white culture as America’s defining characteristic. (Bannon may claim to reject “white nationalism,” but he’s been <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism?utm_term=.ab3GbnoqD#.teNjz71Z2">courting its proponents</a> for years.) Such an ideology dispenses with the need for the fanciful interpretation of the U.S. Constitution that the Tea Party movement made its talisman. White nationalism has little need for the Constitution at all. White nationalists invoke the Constitution only when asserting their right to say hateful things, or to carry the <a href="http://billmoyers.com/story/white-supremacist-chaos-charlottesville-just-beginning/">lethal weaponry that was on display</a> that awful summer day in Charlottesville, Virginia. The more power they gain, the less they need the protections of the Constitution, because their ideology stands <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/his-kampf/524505/">in opposition to democracy</a>.</p>
<p>Without even having to launch actual primary challenges, Bannon has already run two U.S. senators from office: Flake and Bob Corker of Tennessee, who yesterday <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/24/politics/corker-trump-photo-op-tax-plan/index.html">told CNN</a> that “the president has great difficulty with the truth.” Fear of the promised primary challenge drove men from office; neither was up for a fight he believed he would lose.</p>
<p>That fear is driven by Bannon’s backing of Roy Moore in Alabama’s current U.S. Senate contest—the former Judge Roy Moore, who was twice thrown off the bench of his state’s Supreme Court for having refused to uphold the U.S. Constitution. With an assist from Bannon after declaring his candidacy, Moore beat the incumbent Luther Strange in Alabama’s Republican primary, despite Strange’s endorsement by Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. By supporting Moore—who advocated against the removal of segregationist mandates in the Alabama state constitution—Bannon also put Trump and Pence on notice that the would-be kingmaker and his donors expected the administration to stay the white nationalist course, or else there would be trouble.</p>
<p>The message was received. At the Values Voter Summit, an annual conference staged by the political arm of the Family Research Council, the featured big-name speakers were Trump, Moore, and Bannon, who delivered a dark vision of an America facing a bloody “<a href="http://prospect.org/article/allure-far-right-demands-immediate-action">fourth turning</a>” of history.</p>
<p>Should Bannon succeed in launching all the primary challenges he’s threatened, he may just lose a few. But it won’t really matter. The immediate contests aren’t the main act; the coin of the realm is the fear they instill in all Republicans facing re-election, both in the House and the Senate. And fear has always been the animating force of all Bannon productions, whether in the propaganda films he’s produced and written over the years, or at Breitbart.com, the hatemongering website he runs. And, as my colleague <a href="http://prospect.org/article/bannons-revolution-about-power-and-money">Eliza Newlin Carney writes</a>, Bannon’s fearmongering in congressional elections stands to make him an even richer man than he is already.</p>
<p>Absent a critical mass of opposition to Trump from among Republicans in Congress, Trump will remain in power. The longer he remains in power, the more time Bannon will have to reshape the GOP in his white nationalist image.</p>
<p>On Tuesday, <em>Military Times</em>, which covers the military for a readership comprising mostly members of the armed forces, released a poll of service members, who rated “white nationalism” as “a larger national security threat than Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan,” according to a report on the <a href="https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2017/10/23/military-times-poll-one-in-four-troops-sees-white-nationalism-in-the-ranks/"><em>Military Times</em> website</a>. And 1 in 4 troops said they had seen evidence of white nationalism in the ranks.</p>
<p>Viruses grow by injecting their DNA into the cells of a host body, converting those cells into likenesses of the virus itself. <span class="pullquote-right">The white nationalist virus is infecting major segments of the U.S. body politic and the institutions that maintain democracy.</span></p>
<p>To stop it will require vigilance and aggressive action on the part of every American who cares about equality and justice for all, Republican and Democrat alike. There is ample cause for Trump’s removal from office. Now that every Republican is threatened with a primary challenge for the simple sin of incumbency, there’s no reason for members of the Grand Old Party to restrain themselves in the face of the president’s criticisms—unless they really don’t care about the fate of the republic.</p>
<p>It really is just that simple.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 25 Oct 2017 13:52:07 +0000228784 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanThe Allure of the Far Right Demands Immediate Actionhttp://prospect.org/article/allure-far-right-demands-immediate-action
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<p>Steve Bannon speaks at a campaign rally on October 17, 2017, for Arizona Senate candidate Kelli Ward, who is running against incumbent Republican Senator Jeff Flake in the 2018 primary.</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>t is always tempting to dismiss the importance of America’s far right to the nation’s political trajectory, given the torrent of absurd and frankly false claims of its proponents, whether regarding the birth certificate of a president or the meaning of the Constitution. But around the world, the far right is on the rise, infecting nearly every Western democracy, and ours is hardly immune. Witness the election of Donald J. Trump, which most progressives and liberals had deemed impossible. After spending a weekend at the Values Voter Summit, an annual conference hosted by the political arm of the Family Research Council, I fear that same denial remains strong, even in the Age of Trump.</p>
<p>Were there ever a doubt that the Christian right, as represented by the Family Research Council, was anything other than a white Christian identity movement, that notion was laid to rest at this year’s Values Voter Summit, which took place October 13 and 14 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. In fact, you might say that this year’s gathering of right-wing believers contained many of the elements of a <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/citizens-united-breitbart-debut-new-christian-war-film-at-rnc/">Stephen K. Bannon production</a>—a combination of fire, brimstone, explosions, and nationalism, presented in an acrid cloud of coded racism.</p>
<p>Bannon, the propagandist and former chief presidential strategist—a man known more for his foul mouth than his piety—delivered a dark, apocalyptic address to the Values Voter audience, upstaging Trump in the headlines that followed. Sure, Trump received an enthusiastic response when he addressed the conference the day before, but <span class="pullquote-right">Bannon’s burn-it-all-down litany of grievances set the house on fire.</span> Enthusiasm for Bannon was not dampened by the <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism">astonishing BuzzFeed report</a> on the ways in which Bannon courted white supremacists to grow the audience of Breitbart.com, the noxious right-wing website he oversees as executive chairman.</p>
<p>Bannon’s attack from the Values Voter stage on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, which included a promise to back primary challenges to each of the incumbent Republican senators up for re-election next year (with the exception of Texan Ted Cruz), prompted what may go down in history as the most awkward presidential press conference ever, when Trump appeared in the White House Rose Garden on Monday, McConnell at his side.</p>
<p>“Steve is doing what Steve thinks is the right thing,” <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/16/politics/trump-steve-bannon-mitch-mcconnell-war/index.html">Trump said</a> when asked to respond to Bannon’s declared “war” on “the Republican establishment as personified by Mitch McConnell” and the targeted senators. “Some of the people that he may be looking at, I'm going to see if we talk him out of that, because frankly, they're great people,” Trump added. But the president had not an unkind word to say about Bannon, who served as CEO of Trump’s campaign, and has come to represent the heart of Trump’s base. The violence perpetrated in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12 by neo-Nazis and other white supremacists may be seen as yesterday’s news, but Trump’s tortured mixed-messaging on the subject had everything to do with that base and its sympathies.</p>
<p>A menacing undercurrent flowed throughout the Values Voter conference, not only in hyperbolic descriptions of the supposed threats to Western civilization posed by Islam and the American left, but in veiled threats, couched in the language of violence, directed at opponents of the Trump agenda.</p>
<p>Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina and chairman of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, described his ideological fellows as bullets, and Republicans who opposed him as “duds” that should be “ejected from the chamber.” Sebastian Gorka, who was pushed from his role as a White House adviser after an uproar over his links to a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/sebastian-gorka-white-house-vetting-fail/519843/">neo-Nazi group in Hungary</a>, spoke of the greater “damage” he and Bannon would do to the left now that they were no longer a part of the Trump administration. Bannon likened McConnell to Julius Caesar on the eve of Caesar’s assassination. (He did take a moment to qualify his comments as metaphorical.)</p>
<p>Even Family Research Council President Tony Perkins got into the violent-imagery act.</p>
<p>“An old farmer once told me, ‘If you throw a rock into a pigpen, you can always tell which one you hit by who squeals the loudest,’” Perkins said in one of his many turns at the podium. “That sounds pretty simple, but it’s revealing when you hear how loud the left is squealing.”</p>
<p>Given Perkins’s own history, it’s hardly surprising that he would align himself with the likes of Gorka and Bannon, with their ties to neo-Nazis and white supremacists. If anything, Perkins knows his own base. In 1996, Perkins ran the U.S. Senate campaign of Louisiana Republican Woody Jenkins, for which he <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/good-cop-bad-cop/">purchased the phone-bank lists</a> used by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in Duke’s gubernatorial campaign. David Duke was the first Klan leader to work in concert with neo-Nazi groups, as reported by Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons in their book,<em> Right-Wing Populism in America</em>.</p>
<p>In 2001, during his tenure as a Louisiana state legislator, <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/tony-perkins">Perkins addressed the white supremacist</a> Council of Conservative Citizens.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Bannon’s remarks to the religious-right confab was his prediction of a bloody conflict to come, and his assurance to the Values Voters that they would be “the folks who saved the Judeo-Christian West.”</span> He warned that America is now at the point of a “fourth turning”—a reference to the theory of historical cycles put forth by amateur historians William Strauss and Neil Howe, which divides history into cycles of roughly 80 years, each one punctuated by a period of cataclysmic bloodletting.</p>
<p>“We are in the valley of decision,” Bannon said. “This is the fourth great turning in American history. We have had the [American] Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression/World War II. We will be one thing or the other on the other side of it. We are either going to be the country that was bequeathed to previous generations and to you, or we will be something else.”</p>
<p>This backlash, he said, was the result of the “economic hate crimes” perpetrated by the “corporatist clients” of people like Mitch McConnell, the Davos crowd, “the elites.”</p>
<p>According to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/politics/bannon-fourth-turning.html"><em>The New York Times</em>’s reading</a> of Strauss and Howe’s book, “The authors envision a return to a more traditional, conservative social order as one outcome of a crisis. They also see the possibility of retribution and punishment for those who resist or refuse to comply with the new expectations for conformity.”</p>
<p>While it’s true that the people to whom Bannon speaks do not comprise a majority of the American population, Trump has already proven that you don’t need a majority of the popular vote to win the presidency. Republicans have quickly become expert at winning at the margins, be they margins created by <a href="https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7xkmag/gerrymandering-algorithms">algorithmically determined congressional districts</a>, or <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/10/12/russias-facebook-ads-show-how-internet-microtargeting-can-be-weaponized/?utm_term=.9f06929c3a3a">microtargeted Facebook ads</a> designed to suppress turnout among the targeted communities.</p>
<p>Significant leaders among the Christian right are on board with Bannon’s scheme to once again alter the DNA of the GOP by making it hospitable only to those who uphold the Bannon worldview. And the followers don’t seem to mind that Bannon described them in his talk as characters in a beloved fantasy. Speaking of his own worries ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Bannon told the audience that he was assured that “the Hobbits in the Shire are turning out the vote.”</p>
<p>Come 2020, they’ll no doubt be trudging the Shire again, along with Russian bots—in solidarity with the thugs who plagued Charlottesville and the far right of Europe. To dismiss the allure of Bannon’s dystopian nationalism is folly. Such folly is how authoritarians emerge from democracies. While Dumpster fires burn everywhere in the form of oppressive legislation and false narratives, there’s a big conflagration glowing on the ridge. It will take more than a bucket brigade to put it out.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 18 Oct 2017 14:46:57 +0000228740 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanThe GOP Is Now the White Nationalist Party, and That Isn’t Changing Anytime Soonhttp://prospect.org/article/gop-now-white-nationalist-party-and-isn%E2%80%99t-changing-anytime-soon
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<p>White nationalist demonstrators walk in Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12, 2017.</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>t several events at this year’s New Yorker Festival, a sense of wooziness predominated among audience members, who appeared to be grasping for a wisp of hope that the nightmare known as President Trump would soon be over. Alas, experts who graced the stages at three separate events had a common message: Expect Trump to serve out his first term, and perhaps even his second.</p>
<p>The liberals of New York City struggled to comprehend how this could be possible. These are the same people who were certain that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 presidential race. These are people who knew Donald Trump as the tabloid clown who had plagued them for decades, his smug mug sneering from the newsstand. They never dreamed that America would go for putting the clown prince from Queens in the White House. Having failed to consider the lessons of Reconstruction, they couldn’t believe that America would follow the presidency of Barack Obama with that of a white supremacist, a rank misogynist, a hater. They couldn’t believe that such a thing, with its threatening overtones and echoes of the fascist movements that rose in 1930s Europe, could happen here.</p>
<p>At the Directors Guild Theater near Carnegie Hall, in an October 8 panel discussion event titled “It Happened Here,” Republican strategist <a href="https://twitter.com/mindyfinn">Mindy Finn</a> stated baldly: “The Republican party is becoming the white nationalist party.” Finn led the digital strategy team for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. In 2016, she served as running-mate to third-party protest candidate Evan McMullin, a conservative who opposed Trump.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">One needn’t look far for the evidence. Just take a peek at what Steve Bannon is up to.</span> Even as he explained his ideology to my boss and colleague, Robert Kuttner, as “economic nationalism,” what Bannon is really doing, <a href="http://prospect.org/article/white-nationalism-and-economic-nationalism-0">Kuttner observes</a>, is combining economic nationalism with white nationalism. And he plans to do much of that by <a href="http://prospect.org/article/steve-bannon-unleashed">funding and advancing primary challenges</a> to more than a dozen Republican senatorial candidates, a trick that will likely further mutate the DNA of the GOP. In a binary system such as ours, this is a particularly effective tactic, since once the general election comes around, most voters will select their favored candidate from one of the two major parties, often without much more knowledge than the candidate’s party affiliation. These days, most people who consider themselves Republican would recoil at the thought of checking the box next to a Democrat’s name.</p>
<p>“Republican primaries have become very dangerous for incumbents,” observed <a href="https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson">Rick Wilson</a>, a Republican strategist who took part in the Sunday morning panel discussion in New York. Speaking of the motivated electorate in primary races, Wilson said, “That 30 percent of the Republican Party hates their incumbent candidate more than they hate Democrats.”</p>
<p>And Trump has been served notice by Bannon that he dare not stray too far from the white nationalists whom Bannon has courted in his once and present guise of chief executive of the Breitbart.com hate site. In Alabama’s special Senate election, Trump endorsed the incumbent Luther Strange in the GOP primary, only to have Bannon back a primary challenge to Strange from Roy Moore, the theocratic, Constitution-flouting former chief justice of the state Supreme Court. Moore stomped Trump’s candidate to bits. Trump promptly deleted all of his tweets endorsing Strange. Trump hates to lose. He won’t make that mistake again.</p>
<p>“We are a divided country,” said Carl Bernstein to an audience gathered on October 6 at a theater in Chelsea for a panel titled “All the President’s Reporters.”</p>
<p>“We are in the state of a cold civil war in this country,” Bernstein explained. “It is absolutely unprecedented to have a president of the United States who lies about damn near everything as this president does. And, yet, that does not disturb a big part of the citizenry.”</p>
<p>During the Watergate scandal, which Bernstein, with Bob Woodward, exposed in the pages of <em>The Washington Post</em>, people on both sides of the aisle were interested in learning the truth, Bernstein, now an <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/01/politics/bernstein-calls-trump-presidency-malignant-cnntv/index.html">analyst for CNN</a>, explained. That’s not the case today.</p>
<p>“During this last campaign you could tell there was a difference,” said Jane Mayer, the<em> New Yorker</em> reporter who did a deep dive into the Koch brothers’ network in her book <a href="http://billmoyers.com/story/a-must-read-jane-mayers-dark-money-uncovers-the-hidden-history-of-billionaires/"><em>Dark Money</em></a>. “There was a lot of good reporting about Trump, and it wouldn’t break through. … The country is divided because of where it’s getting information.”</p>
<p>On the right, one of the most-trafficked websites is Breitbart.com, which acted as an arm of the Trump campaign during the presidential contest, and continues to advance Trumpian ideals, including the notion that stories about the administration generated by mainstream media outlets are “<a href="http://www.breitbart.com/search/?s=%22fake+news%22#gsc.tab=0&amp;gsc.q=%22fake%20news%22&amp;gsc.page=1">fake news</a>.” Republicans also get their news from the toxic airwaves of right-wing radio and Fox News Channel.</p>
<p>Among the fantasies peddled by such outlets is that of the unworthy black or immigrant or Muslim or woman of any color advancing at the expense of “hardworking” white men. Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of <a href="http://prospect.org/article/hidden-injuries-0"><em>Strangers in Their Own Land</em></a>, calls this the myth of the “line-cutters.”</p>
<p>“There’s been this displacement of blame,” Hochschild said. “That’s what we need to counter.”</p>
<p>Hochschild, the eminent sociologist who spoke on the “It Happened Here” panel, spent years among the white working-class voters whose economic difficulties have drawn a lot of ink since the election. But she seemed to miss a crucial point when she claimed that many of these were good people, not racists. To vote for a candidate who boasts of his racist views and not be deemed a racist seems a neat trick to me. It’s a form of denial and projection that allows America as a whole off the hook for the election of Trump. To say that Trump is racist but his voters are not is the moral equivalent of saying, “The devil made me do it.” Satan was never more than a device for the externalization of evil that lives in the human heart. </p>
<p>The truth is that the United States is a deeply racist country, and that racism lives among liberals, where it takes more genteel forms, as it does in more naked forms among those who call themselves conservatives. Liberal astonishment at the ascendance of Trump speaks to this. Collective denial over the depth of America’s racism amounts to a passive form of racism in and of itself. Because if the white majority in the liberal establishment listened to what black people tell us of their lives and experience, we wouldn’t be in denial.</p>
<p>“It’s not surprising that this is happening,” said <em>New Yorker</em> staff writer <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-louis-armstrong-to-the-nfl-ungrateful-as-the-new-uppity">Jelani Cobb</a> to moderator Dorothy Wickenden, the magazine’s executive editor. “It’s unsettling, but it’s not surprising. On June 16 of 2015, Dylann Roof … shot nine people, and one person who had shot who had not yet died asked him why he was doing this, and he said, ‘Your people are raping our women.’ On June 17, 2015, Donald Trump declared his candidacy, saying in part, the country was besieged by Mexican rapists. I don’t think there’s a causal relationship between those two things, but I think they are both responding to a similar zeitgeist … the idea of the frenzy you can drive people to with the idea of white women being imperiled particularly by men of color.”</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">It is natural, when staving off despair, to look for a quick and easy end to peril.</span> At the panel about reporting on the president, an audience member asked about the likelihood that Trump would be pushed from office via the 25th Amendment, which allows for the removal a president deemed unfit for duty by a majority of the cabinet. Bernstein said he didn’t see it happening.</p>
<p>Neither did <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/09/the-man-who-terrifies-wall-street">Jeffrey Toobin</a>, the CNN legal analyst and <em>New Yorker</em> writer who interviewed former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara on the stage of the New York Society for Ethical Culture on October 7. “I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Toobin said in answer to a question from his audience. Bharara was no more soothing.</p>
<p>“People should get used to the idea that Donald Trump is going to be president of the United States through his first term most likely,” said Bharara, who was fired by Trump after refusing to return the president’s phone call because he saw such interaction as an ethical problem.</p>
<p>“I think it would be more useful for people to focus … on ways to counteract the policies they disagree with, assuming he's going to be in office,” Bharara added, “rather than this wishful thinking that something's going to drop from the heavens to remove him.”</p>
<p>In meantime, though, there’s no doubt that white supremacists have been emboldened by the Trump presidency, and the president’s rhetoric—such as his contention that some “very fine people” took part in the August 11 torch-lit “white nationalist” march to the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The next day, violence exploded in that town when those who carried the torches were joined by neo-Confederate and neo-Nazi forces to engage in acts of collective and individual thuggery.</p>
<p>On Tuesday, an <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/10/10/black-man-beaten-at-white-nationalist-rally-in-charlottesville-faces-felony-charge/?hpid=hp_hp-morning-mix_mm-charlottesville%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&amp;tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.6db68889c910">arrest warrant was issued for a black man</a> who was brutally beaten by white supremacists on that day, in apparent retaliation for the fact that charges have been pressed against some of his attackers, thanks to internet sleuthing led by activist Shaun King.</p>
<p>One of those alleged attackers, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/10/10/black-man-beaten-at-white-nationalist-rally-in-charlottesville-faces-felony-charge/?hpid=hp_hp-morning-mix_mm-charlottesville%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&amp;tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.6db68889c910">caught on video</a> assaulting DeAndre Harris, is now blaming Harris for injuries he appears to have sustained in skirmish with another white supremacist, according to Harris’s attorney, S. Lee Merritt, who has been <a href="https://twitter.com/i/web/status/917848960399757313">tweeting out video</a> that appears to back up his claim. Harris was attacked in front of the Charlottesville Police headquarters, and that attack was caught on video, as well. Merritt <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/10/10/black-man-beaten-at-white-nationalist-rally-in-charlottesville-faces-felony-charge/?hpid=hp_hp-morning-mix_mm-charlottesville%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&amp;tid=a_inl&amp;utm_term=.6db68889c910">told <em>The Washington Post</em></a> that the arrest warrant for Harris resulted from charges pressed by the white supremacist Harold Ray Crews, whose case, Merritt added, is being driven by the neo-Confederate group, League of the South.</p>
<p>At the panel on reporting, Jane Mayer offered a glimmer of hope for the nation’s future, saying that ultimately Trump will be seen for what he is, for all that he is.</p>
<p>“I feel the truth will win,” she said. “I have enough faith in the American public that they will see who’s really telling the truth.”</p>
<p>But until that happens, the question remains of how many lives will be harmed or destroyed in the interim. What’s to be done? Resist with all of our might.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 11 Oct 2017 16:52:58 +0000228695 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanHow the NRA Made the Gun a Symbol of Tribal Identityhttp://prospect.org/article/how-nra-made-gun-symbol-tribal-identity
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<p>Pro-Confederate flag and gun supporters rally in Stone Mountain, Georgia, on August 1, 2015.</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>n the aftermath of Sunday’s attack by a gunman on a country music concert in Las Vegas, the National Rifle Association fell silent. According to police, Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and wounded more than 500 before dying at his own hand as a SWAT team bore down on the room at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino from which he targeted his victims.</p>
<p>As the scale of mass shootings in the United States has risen, a pattern has taken shape: the death of dozens in a single assault by heavily armed assailants, followed by days or weeks of silence from leaders of the organization that bills itself as “America's longest-standing civil rights organization.” The “civil right” to which the NRA commits itself of course is not the right of non-aggressors to live unaccosted by bullets, but rather the right to bear arms, which it claims precludes all reasonable regulation of guns and related equipment designed for no other purpose than to kill human beings with increasing levels of efficiency.</p>
<p>The NRA’s transition from an organization of sportsmen to an advocacy group for merchants of death was made possible, and perhaps inevitable, by the coalescence of the New Right into the political force that ultimately took over the Republican Party in 1980 with the presidential nomination of Ronald Reagan.</p>
<p>By 1976, the right was on the rise as Reagan challenged the incumbent Gerald Ford for the nomination. In 1977, a group of right-wing gun activists took over the NRA in something of a coup, <a href="http://billmoyers.com/2014/06/12/the-rise-of-the-nra-2/">described by Michael Waldman</a>, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, in his 2014 book, <em>The Second Amendment</em>.</p>
<p>Among the many contributions of the New Right to the noxious state of current American politics is its promotion of deep distrust in the U.S. government, especially in domestic activities and programs. Surely, after the resignation of Richard Nixon once his criminality was exposed, or the revelations of the <a href="https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/investigations/ChurchCommittee.htm">Church committee</a> of government spying on left-wing political groups, the government had earned a hefty amount of distrust. The stoking of right-wing suspicions, however, were primarily directed not at surveillance programs targeting civil rights and anti-war groups—where the government clearly did violate members’ constitutional rights—but instead at the alleged intent of the government to deprive “law-abiding” white people (especially men) of their rights, foremost among them an implied right to supremacy over non-white citizens, particularly African Americans.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">An old stereotype of Southern whites as drivers of pick-up trucks plastered with Confederate flag decals and outfitted with a shotgun rack ultimately became a symbol of tribal identity, the tribe being people who feared their displacement in the emerging new social order.</span> In the West, where the gun was already venerated as a symbol of the white man’s conquest over the lands of indigenous people, suspicion of the federal government, seen as the instrument of liberal elites prone to implementing troublesome land-use regulations, wasn’t difficult to foment.</p>
<p>Combined with anxiety over white men’s place in the social and economic food chains (where even the poorest enjoyed more privilege than black people, Native Americans, and non-white immigrants) paranoia over the government’s intentions served the New Right’s purposes, which were never anything more than an agenda to maintain and increase the power of those who already enjoyed it via the system of white patriarchy.</p>
<p>In Congress this week, a vote was expected on a measure, pushed by the NRA, that would legalize gun silencers and armor-piercing bullets. With the news of the slaughter in Las Vegas by a shooter who may have legally come by all of his dozens of firearms, that measure was put on hold. Nonetheless, House Speaker Paul Ryan has <a href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-las-vegas-shooting-live-updates-congress-unable-to-pass-firearm-1506964271-htmlstory.html">refused to rule out</a> a future vote on the measure. Those, like Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who responded to the news by calling for strengthening firearm regulation, were accused by the White House and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of politicizing a tragedy. Murphy’s advocacy for gun regulation, it must be noted, is driven by the 2012 massacre of 20 children and several adults by a lone gunman at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in his state. </p>
<p>Had Stephen Paddock issued his hundreds of rounds into a concert venue through a silencer, <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/09/the-latest-push-to-deregulate-guns-could-make-gang-style-hits-easier/">experts say</a>, the death toll could have been far higher than it already is—an astonishing thought given Paddock’s status as having conducted the most deadly mass shooting by a lone gunman in modern history.</p>
<p>For years, the NRA has framed opposition to gun regulation as being the on the side of the angels in America’s culture wars. In a widely circulated NRA video posted in June, right-wing pundit Dana Loesch all but called for violent opposition to left-wing protests. After issuing a raft of misleading statements—including the now-common smear of news reports as “fake”—Loesch says in the video, “The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.”</p>
<p>Two months later, the streets of Charlottesville were greeted not only with neo-Nazis bearing clubs and other weapons allegedly in defense of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, but also scores of amateur militiamen equipped with body armor and <a href="http://billmoyers.com/story/white-supremacist-chaos-charlottesville-just-beginning/">semi-automatic rifles</a>, allegedly in defense of the same statue, which the Charlottesville City Council had marked for removal from a public park.</p>
<p>With the NRA having gone silent after the Las Vegas attack, author Louis Moore, who teaches at Grand Valley State University, <a href="https://twitter.com/loumoore12/status/915047938887442433">tweeted</a>: “Imagine losing your shit over nonviolent protests, but keeping your cool over mass killings.”</p>
<p>Unknown at this point is whether the massacre at Las Vegas will cause some rethinking of the NRA’s agenda of weapons proliferation as a marker of tribal identity, seeing as those killed and wounded by Paddock were fans of an art form, country music, which is often the music of choice by members of that very tribe. Singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, daughter of one of country music’s most beloved figures, the late Johnny Cash, took to the op-ed page of the liberal <em>New York Times</em> to call upon her fellows in the Nashville-centered music community to “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/opinion/rosanne-cash-country-musicians-nra.html">stand up to the NRA</a>.”</p>
<p>But as the ongoing battle over monuments to Confederate luminaries reveals, the dislodging of tribal symbols comes hard. As it is with the Dixie flag, so now it is with the gun and its accoutrements, even in their most lethal forms.</p>
<p>Leaders of the NRA may be evil, but they’re not stupid. When it comes to hearts and minds, they know how to win the support they need. Reason rarely triumphs over the symbols of identity—at least not without a large measure of bloodletting.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 04 Oct 2017 17:31:53 +0000228653 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanEuropean Far Right Finds Inspiration in Trumphttp://prospect.org/article/european-far-right-finds-inspiration-trump
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<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>n Germany, the baseball cap is not a common sight. So when Beatrix von Storch, a leading voice of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), donned a red one, the sight turned some heads, especially because of its similarities to President Donald J. Trump’s signature campaign cap. But instead of the inscription “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” von Storch’s read “<a href="https://www.facebook.com/afdberlin/photos/a.153594904822650.1073741828.151543935027747/771152103066924/?type=3&amp;theater">MAKE GERMANY SAFE AGAIN</a>.” On September 24, AfD became the first far-right party to win seats in the Bundestag since World War II, and the third-largest party in the nation’s parliament.</p>
<p>While it’s true that far-right political parties in Europe long pre-date Trump’s presidential campaign (see <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/06/jean-marie-le-pen-fined-again-dismissing-holocaust-detail">Jean-Marie Le Pen</a>, who founded France’s Front National in 1972), European politicians with xenophobic, racist, and/or misogynist views are finding inspiration in the 45th president of the United States. Nigel Farage, former leader of the U.K. Independence Party, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj4K9fr_WgY">campaigned with Trump</a>. Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/gays-for-trump-join-conspiracy-theorists-in-bringing-anti-islam-anti-pc-message-to-rnc/">hobnobbed</a> with the notable celebrities of the U.S. far right who came to witness Donald Trump’s acceptance of the GOP presidential nomination at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Farage’s specialty is xenophobia; Wilders’s is Islamophobia. In 2016, Wilders told revelers at a far-right event headlined by Milo Yiannopoulos, then of Brietbart.com, that “<a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/gays-for-trump-join-conspiracy-theorists-in-bringing-anti-islam-anti-pc-message-to-rnc/">Islam has no place in a free society</a>.” Both are leaders whose movements formed long before the Trump campaign, but who doubtless see Trump’s rise as a harbinger of their own presumably coming good fortune.</p>
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<p>Sometimes the inspiration goes the other way around, however. Presaging Trump’s war with the National Football League over the practice of an increasing number of players—nearly all African American—who refuse to stand during the playing of the national anthem before games in protest of racism and police brutality, AfD’s von Storch kicked up some dust with a what appeared to be a <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/afd-deputy-chief-sparks-outrage-with-racist-tweet/a-19388740">complain</a>t about the ethnic and racial composition of Germany’s team in the Euro 2016 soccer championship. “Well, maybe next time the German NATIONAL TEAM should play again,” <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/afd-deputy-chief-sparks-outrage-with-racist-tweet/a-19388740">von Storch tweeted</a>. Most took that to be a comment on the fact that five players on the German team were immigrants.</p>
<p>When controversy ensued, von Storch <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/afd-deputy-chief-sparks-outrage-with-racist-tweet/a-19388740">deleted the tweet</a>. But after Trump’s attack on the protesting players, von Storch might be more willing to stand by such convictions. After all, Trump leads the world’s economically and militarily dominant nation, and apparently sees no downside in calling Colin Kaepernick—the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who began the protest during his tenure with the team—“a son of a bitch” and demanding the firing of players who refuse to stand for the anthem. Yet, as von Storch claimed in the wake of the controversy stirred by her soccer tweet that her it was not about immigrants but <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/afd-deputy-chief-sparks-outrage-with-racist-tweet/a-19388740">about national pride</a>, so Trump claims that his remarks had nothing to do with race, and are simply about “respect for our flag and for our country.” If nothing else, there’s an exchange of energy going on here.</p>
<p>Any differences between AfD politicians and Trump often seem to be merely by matter of degree. Von Storch called for “illegal immigrants” to Germany <a href="http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/german-far-right-afd-mep-who-said-shoot-illegal-immigrants-joins-farages-eu-group-1554093">to be shot</a> at the border; Trump has merely called for their detention in harsh conditions and their ultimate deportation.</p>
<p>Before it became known foremost as an anti-immigrant party, AfD made its mark as the party that opposed Germany’s participation in the European Union.</p>
<p>In Munich, at one of Angela Merkel’s final campaign rallies before last Sunday’s election, Wilfried Biedermann, the local AfD chairman of <a href="http://www.focus.de/regional/muenchen/" title="More about Munich"><strong>Munich</strong></a>-Ost, was passing out literature for his candidacy, hoping to peel votes away from Merkel from among those who normally vote for the Christian Social Union, an affiliate of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Talking to a small group of U.S. journalists, Biedermann expressed his enthusiasm for Trump’s message.</p>
<p>Speaking English, Biedermann told the reporters:<span class="pullquote-right"> “When Donald Trump says, ‘America first,’ we say, too, ‘Germany first.’”</span></p>
<p>Some in liberal circles dismiss the importance of AfD’s triumph in this election, which amounts to its seating in parliament as a party, because of the fact that it <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2017/sep/24/german-elections-2017-latest-results-live-merkel-bundestag-afd">drew a mere 12.6 percent</a> of the vote, as opposed to as the CDU’s 32.9 percent and the Social Democrats’ (SPD) 20.5 percent. But that 12.6 represents an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2017/sep/24/german-elections-2017-latest-results-live-merkel-bundestag-afd">uptick of some 7.9 points</a> since the last election cycle. Meanwhile, the two major parties, CDU and SPD, lost 8.6 and 5.2 points, respectively.</p>
<p>Others cite squabbling within AfD as a sedative to feelings of alarm. But internecine political warfare doesn’t always amount to defeat. Just look at the Trump campaign, whose first two leaders, Corey Lewandowski and Paul Manafort, were each fired before Stephen K. Bannon was appointed in August 2016 to lead the final sprint to the White House.</p>
<p>You can issue all the caveats you want. As in the last U.S. presidential election, the energy, clearly, is on the right in Germany’s political culture. And AfD turns its lonely eyes to Trump.</p>
<p><em>Adele M. Stan explored the German elections as a guest of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, an independent foundation affiliated with Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD).</em></p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 27 Sep 2017 15:57:12 +0000228604 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanWith Back Against the Wall, Trump Threatens to Blow a Nation to Smithereenshttp://prospect.org/article/back-against-wall-trump-threatens-blow-nation-smithereens
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<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>hings are not going well for Donald Trump. So he might just blow up the world.</p>
<p>Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, appears to be getting squeezed to give up the goods on the president. The grip belongs to Robert Mueller, the special counsel whose appointment resulted from Trump’s firing of then-FBI Director James Comey.</p>
<p>First there was the FBI’s search-warranted, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/fbi-conducted-predawn-raid-of-former-trump-campaign-chairman-manaforts-home/2017/08/09/5879fa9c-7c45-11e7-9d08-b79f191668ed_story.html?utm_term=.d870cbbe2a14">guns-drawn raid</a> of Manafort’s Alexandria, Virginia, home in July, during which agents seized documents. Now comes word that Manafort has been under surveillance for years because of his work for the pro-Putin political party of former Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych, which resulted in a wiretap on his phones issued to the FBI under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Some of the calls intercepted involved Manafort’s discussions with Russians about the presidential campaign, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/18/politics/paul-manafort-government-wiretapped-fisa-russians/index.html">CNN reports</a>; others may include conversations between Manafort and Trump himself, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paul-manafort-surveillance-during-2016-campaign/">according to CBS News</a>. Manafort has reportedly been told by Mueller’s team that he’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/2017/9/18/16330978/paul-manafort-wiretap-indictment">about to be indicted</a>.</p>
<p>Mueller’s aggressive actions against Manafort are leading to speculation that his investigation of Russia’s attempts to sway the U.S. presidential election, and the possible involvement of the Trump campaign in those efforts, <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/mueller-russia-indictment">may conclude more quickly</a> than special counsel investigations typically do. (They can stretch for years.)</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Meanwhile, Trump finds himself unable to get what he needs from the leadership of the majority party—which happens to be his own.</span> So, he’s had to turn to the enemy for aid and comfort, cutting a deal with the minority leaders of the House and Senate to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/09/07/trump-schumer-agree-to-pursue-plan-to-repeal-the-debt-ceiling/?utm_term=.b23556df4758">keep the government in business</a>. His right-wing pals are not amused over tales of his <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/chuck-schumer-nancy-pelosi-daca-deal-trump-w-h-article-1.3493006">Chinese-food make-nice</a> with Chuck and Nancy. (Would love to have broken open the fortune cookies that came with that order.)</p>
<p>And if that all wasn’t enough trouble in Trumpland, Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former campaign CEO and White House strategist, is <a href="http://www.al.com/news/mobile/index.ssf/2017/09/how_stephen_bannon_looms_large.html">leading the charge</a> against Luther Strange, the Senate candidate Trump endorsed in Alabama. Bannon is backing primary challenger Roy Moore, whose major claim to fame is his defiance of the U.S. Constitution in the name of the Ten Commandments. (Moore lost his seat as the chief justice of that state’s Supreme Court when he defied a court order to stop telling officials not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the denial of such marriages unconstitutional.)</p>
<p>An article on <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/09/19/wh-sources-concerns-about-crowd-size-for-trump-luther-strange-event-to-be-held-at-smaller-venue-than-2016-rally/">Breitbart.com</a>, to which Bannon has returned as the wingnut site’s chief executive, gleefully notes that this week’s September 22 Trump event on Strange’s behalf is slated for a smaller venue than the one where Trump held his Alabama campaign rally, for fear he wouldn’t be able to fill the larger venue.</p>
<p>It is against this gloomy backdrop that the president’s Tuesday <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/world/trump-un-north-korea-iran.html">speech to the United Nations General Assembly</a> must be viewed, what with its <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/world/trump-speech-united-nations.html">homage to national sovereignty</a> in one breath, and threats to sovereign nations in the next. If there’s anything Trump knows how to do, it’s to deflect criticism by changing the subject and saying something outrageous.</p>
<p>Trump also needs to feel important, and to him importance is defined by his ability to cause harm to others. That’s how he’s done business all his life. Just ask the many contractors he’s stiffed, or the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atlantic-city.html?mcubz=1">city on the Jersey Shore</a> he helped to sink with his bankrupt casinos. He also thrives on the reaction he can elicit from his targets, and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has proven himself susceptible to Trump’s one-upmanship. Each time Trump insults him, Kim follows up with another rocket launch. And Trump clearly knew that his threat to “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/world/trump-un-north-korea-iran.html">totally destroy North Korea</a>,” along with his description of the U.N. deal with Iran to stall its nuclear weapons program—a deal to which the U.S. is a party—would knock his own troubles off the front pages of mainstream newspapers around the world.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Trump’s U.N. speech was a hash of incongruent assertions.</span> The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/world/trump-speech-united-nations.html">sovereignty bit</a> could have been written by the nationalist Bannon himself, builder of “the platform for the alt-right.” Well, except for that part where Trump said sovereignty is to be put in the service for the good of humanity. But Bannon’s nationalist wing is not terribly keen on engagement with foreign powers, so the stuff about destroying North Korea probably wouldn’t go over all that well with that crew, nor would the brief mention in the speech of Trump’s recent commitment to keep the United States in Afghanistan indefinitely. Yet, a different slice of the right-wing base—those who worship all things military–probably got a charge out of all of that.</p>
<p>With the Mueller investigation looking very bad for Trump, and Republicans in Congress unwilling to do his bidding, he may very well see war abroad as his path to maintaining power at home. Chaos and destruction has always worked for him. It worked to his advantage in the Republican presidential primary, and in the general election. He made out well when his casinos went bust, leaving creditors holding the bag for his losses, not to mention the working people of Atlantic City. In the aftermath, when banks would no longer fund his ventures, he turned to Russian investors.</p>
<p>For Trump, the next adventure is always bigger and bolder than the last. So far, he’s gotten away with pretty much every horrible thing he’s ever done—to his investors, to his contractors, to his wives, to his daughters, to every woman whose private parts he ever grabbed. He’s determined to get away with having grabbed the White House through nefarious means—no matter who gets hurt, with the exception of his bad self. That’s the art of Trump’s deal. Nobody wins but him. </p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 20 Sep 2017 14:21:47 +0000228516 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. StanBannon’s Oligarch Cage Match Worries GOPhttp://prospect.org/article/bannons-oligarch-cage-match-worries-gop
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<p><span class="dropcap">S</span>tephen K. Bannon, current <em>Breitbart News</em> CEO and former White House strategist, is everywhere these days, it seems—on your TV, <a href="http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-steve-bannon-free-speech-uc-berkeley-20170912-story.html">college campuses</a>, and smack in the middle of the midterm congressional elections.</p>
<p>The day his blustery interview with Charlie Rose aired on the September 10 edition of CBS’s <em><a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-breitbart-steve-bannon-declares-war-on-the-gop/">60 Minutes</a></em>, word spread of Bannon’s intervention in campaigns for upcoming U.S. Senate campaigns; he’s backing primary challengers to sitting Republican Senators Jeff Flake of Arizona, Luther Strange of Alabama, and Dean Heller of Nevada. It’s not his own money he’s spending, of course. For this project, as for most recent Bannon escapades, the money is coming from Robert Mercer, the reclusive hedge-fund billionaire, <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/10/bannon-gop-primaries-mcconnell-trump-242522">according to Alex Isenstadt of <em>Politico</em></a>. Also under consideration for the Bannon treatment, <em>Politico</em> reports, is Roger Wicker of Mississippi, and Bob Corker of Tennessee. Their sin? Insufficient loyalty to President Donald J. Trump.</p>
<p>As Republican leaders fret over a possible loss of control of the Senate due to Bannon’s actions, they fail to notice that Bannon is not playing a short-term game for GOP majorities in Congress. Bannon’s game is one for control of the Republican Party writ large.</p>
<p>It’s clear that Mercer has no small amount of envy for the Koch brothers, the billionaire siblings whose will has largely shaped the GOP agenda as the party became ever more dependent on the <a href="http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigations/politicsandgovernment/1417/tea_party%2C_inc./">political infrastructure built by the Kochs</a> and the <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/01/28/charles-koch-donor-summit/97185948/">donor network</a> they have cultivated over the course of decades. No longer insurgents, the Kochs and their political beneficiaries have become part of the GOP establishment. House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose career got a <a href="http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/romneys-veep-choice-paul-ryan-koch-ally-and-right-wing-social-engineer">mighty boost</a> from the Koch-founded Americans For Prosperity (AFP), is a case in point. Ryan, along with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, are now tasked with the realities of governing, which often leads them to make decisions that are at odds with the president’s whims. And that makes them, and some of the incumbents they hope to re-elect, the focus of right-wing ire.</p>
<p>Bannon and his patron Mercer, it seems, are willing to take their chances on the possible loss of the GOP’s narrow Senate majority if the gambit places Mercer in the kingmaker’s seat, supplanting the Koch brothers in that role. But there’s a fly in that ointment, for nearly all Republican lawmakers depend on the Koch brothers’ political apparatus in order to win re-election, especially the get-out-the-vote operations of Americans For Prosperity, and the <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/koch-brothers-rnc-113359">data firm i360</a>. Bannon seems to be betting that AFP will turn out the vote for any Republican who runs for the Senate, including the neo-theocrat Roy Moore, whom <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/04/alabama-senate-race-special-election-breitbart-242307">Bannon is backing</a> against Strange in the Alabama Republican primary.</p>
<p>Then again, Bannon may night mind seeing the GOP lose the Senate, seeing how that would deprive McConnell, as special target of Bannon’s opprobrium, of what power he currently holds. Both Ryan and McConnell, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-breitbart-steve-bannon-declares-war-on-the-gop/">Bannon charged</a> in his <em>60 Minutes </em>interview, seek “to nullify the 2016 election.”</p>
<p>He added: “They do not want Donald Trump's populist, economic nationalist agenda to be implemented. It's very obvious.” </p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">The Republican leaders won’t help Trump, Bannon said, unless they’re “put on notice” via the war he’s planning to wage on them.</span></p>
<p>Given Bannon’s longstanding contempt for McConnell and Ryan, it would be easy to take these statements at face value. But there’s something far deeper going on. This is not about a battle for the soul of the party. It’s about which billionaires get to control the levers of power. And Mercer clearly thinks it should be him.</p>
<p>During the presidential campaign, the Koch brothers made a show of not backing Donald Trump for the party’s nomination, and later saying they wouldn’t put money into the presidential contest. But that was more posture than pledge, since all of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/06/03/how-americans-for-prosperity-gets-out-the-vote/?utm_term=.b6c2af123190">AFP’s voter-turnout efforts</a> surely redounded to Trump’s benefit, since most who came to a voting booth to select a Republican for Congress likely marked the box next to Trump’s line among the choices for president. Like many Republicans, Koch operations like to play the race card without naming it as such. Calls for ending Obamacare or shrinking the food stamp program: This is the kind of code employed in Kochian rhetoric. Trump’s crime was his coarse and obvious embrace of haters of all stripes.</p>
<p>Mercer, however, doesn’t stand on ceremony. He’s poured some <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage">$10 million into Breitbart.com</a>, the website Bannon proudly dubbed “the platform of the alt-right,” where Islamophobia and racism shape false narratives about terrorism and crime, and misogyny abounds. Mercer money also <a href="http://www.investopedia.com/news/trump-donor-robert-mercer-funded-book-clinton-cash-dealings/">fueled the nonprofit Government Accountability Institute</a> founded by Bannon, which generated false narratives about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, producing the since-discredited book, <em>Clinton Cash</em>, whose claims were picked up by <em>The New York Times</em>. Mercer also gave Bannon a top post at his for-profit political data firm, Cambridge Analytica, which uses Facebook profiles to determine voter preferences. (Bannon resigned as <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-25/bannon-gets-approval-to-sell-holdings-in-data-and-film-companies">Cambridge Analytica’s vice president</a> when he won his White House appointment.)</p>
<p>Democrats may rub their hands in glee at the specter of Mercer battle against the Kochs for the GOP. But ultimately, Bannon’s gambit is bad for democracy. A Republican Party pushed to embrace Trump’s neo-fascism will still remain one of the nation’s two major political parties—which means they will sometimes win. And when a battle between would-be oligarchs stands to shape the whole of American politics, you have to wonder if there’s even a democracy at present.</p>
<p>Bannon’s scorched-earth tactics may harm the Republican Party in the short run, but could wound the nation for generations to come.</p>
</div></div></div>Wed, 13 Sep 2017 14:20:56 +0000228465 at http://prospect.orgAdele M. Stan